Last month, we caught a glimpse of what would be the Meta alternative to Twitter. It looked a lot like a mix between the Elon Musk-owned bird app and its own Instagram. More recently, it seems like the Facebook parent company has held a preview of this competing service for employees, and bits from the preview are now online.
The Verge reports that this new platform will be a “standalone app” and confirms that it will indeed be based on Instagram. It will also get ActivityPub integration. That’s the name of a decentralised social media protocol, for those who are unfamiliar. The integration means that potential users can, in theory, migrate accounts and followers from other apps that support the protocol onto the new platform, with an example being Mastodon.
According to the report, Chris Cox, chief product officer of Meta, said that this will be the company’s “response to Twitter”. Cox states that this bird app alternative came about following company execs “hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run”. Which sounds like the natural business response, seeing as other competitors like the aforementioned Mastodon started picking up steam when Twitter started becoming more volatile.
During the presentation, Cox says that coding for the new social media alternative started back in January, and that it will be made available “as soon as we can”. This neither confirms nor denies a previous claim that it will be released at the end of this month, which is unfortunate. Instead, we learn that internally, this social media platform is being referred to as Project 92, and may have a public facing name of Threads. It’s a simple enough name for what it will be like, if a little on the nose.
(Source: The Verge)
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