Instagram-owner Meta is exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates, a company spokesperson said on Friday.
The new social media app would be a direct competitor to billionaire Elon Musk’s Twitter.
‘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 Reuters in an emailed statement.
Earlier in the day, Indian business news website Moneycontrol.com first reported the news, citing sources.
The report said Meta’s new content app would support ActivityPub, the decentralized social networking protocol that powers Twitter-rival Mastodon and other federated apps.
While Twitter and Facebook are controlled by one authority – a company – decentralized platforms such as Mastodon are installed on thousands of computer servers, largely run by volunteer administrators who join their systems together in a federation.
The new app would be Instagram-branded and will allow users to register or log in through their Instagram credentials, according to the Moneycontrol report.
Since Musk took over Twitter last year after buying it for $44 billion, the social media platform has undergone a lot of changes.
The app has also been plagued by multiple outages as Musk manages a skeleton team after laying off a big chunk of its workforce in recurring rounds of layoffs.
In the latest round of Twitter layoffs, around 200 product managers, data scientists and engineers responsible for site reliability, were fired.
As Twitter descends into chaos, many users turned to Mastodon, an early front-runner in the bid to replace Twitter. A sizeable amount of people have already jumped ship – including famous faces like Stephen Fry and Caitlin Moran.
Now Mark Zuckerberg seems to be eyeing on capitalising the gap in the market for a reliable text based social media app.
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