Where there’s disaffected twits there’s potential revenue, and Facebook parent smells blood – er, profit
Not content to sit on the sidelines while Twitter falters, Facebook parent Meta is working on a text-focused competitor, based on the decentralized bones of fediverse favorite Mastodon.
Reportedly dubbed «P92» internally, the app may well interoperate with Mastodon by supporting the ActivityPub protocol, and could be Instagram-branded and accessed via that social media juggernaut – if it ever clears the «wouldn’t it be cool if» stage. Existence of the project was revealed exclusively by Indian business news website Moneycontrol, which said it spoke with insiders and also saw a copy of an internal P92 product brief.
Meta didn’t deny the scoop. In a statement to The Register, the Silicon Valley giant even said it’s working on something decentralized and Twitter-adjacent. «We’re exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates. We believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests,» a Meta spokesperson told us.
As to whether it would be based on ActivityPub or simply compatible with it, how far along in development the project is or anything else about it, for that matter, Meta kept mum.
