The uncertainty surrounding the now Musk-owned Twitter has prompted Instagram to begin work on a competitor.
The new app is expected to launch sometime this year, likely as soon as the summer. The text-based app will be standalone, but users will be able to keep their Instagram verification and handle—while their followers will be notified to follow them on the new platform. This new Twitter clone doesn’t have an official name yet, but the architecture of how it works gives us some idea.
The platform appears to use the ActivityPub protocol, which makes it interoperable with Mastodon and its federation of social servers. The company is hoping to on-board high profile public figures like athletes, actors, producers, show runners, and comedians to get users on board with yet another text-based social media app.
According to Lia Haberman on Twitter, the new app appears to feature creator controls and account safety features from the get go. Accounts that have been blocked on Instagram will carry over to the new Twitter clone. The app is codenamed ‘P92’ or Barcelona, and Meta has been hush-hush about its development.
“We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates,” a Meta spokesperson said about the leak. “We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”
Musk-owned Twitter has undergone so many Frankstein transformations that it’s hard to say what the platform’s intent is anymore. Twitter started as a quick way to share text updates among friends and quickly became a public space to follow along with news-breaking events as they happened. Now it’s a place to upload two-hour troll videos and have the worst dregs of societies’ views pushed to the top of any popular thread simply because they paid $8 bucks.
The market is looking for something to replace Twitter, but many of the solutions are niche. BlueSky aims to be what Twitter once was—will Meta beat Jack Dorsey to creating Twitter 2.0?