The troubles of Twitter, which seems to be experiencing shock after shock following its acquisition by Elon Musk, are an opportunity for others to try and take its place. Alongside projects of an experimental nature such as Post by former Waze CEO Noam Bardin, Meta is now joining and according to the report, which was also verified by an executive at the company, it is developing a new social network focused on sharing short textual posts. The name of the project is P92, and the person responsible for it is Instagram CEO Adam Mosari.
But P92 is not just an imitation of Twitter. Meta explains that it is a “decentralized” social network, based on the ActivityPub protocol – the same technology on which the open source project Mastodon is based, another name that has emerged in recent months as an alternative to Twitter. This means, unusually for Meta, the absence of centralized control over the social network and allowing each user to set up their own server, with unique community rules including laws on what is allowed and what is not allowed in advertising.
Meta believes that it will be possible to combine in one application this model of separate and distributed servers, and between typical features of a social network such as tracking friends and celebrities independently of connecting to one or another server. This is a significant technical challenge, and accordingly Meta does not yet have any estimate that it is ready to give regarding an expected launch date. Of course, there are also legal and regulatory issues, which, according to the report, the company’s lawyers have already begun to deal with.
However, it appears that at launch, users will be able to use their existing Instagram account to log into the P92, with automatic friend list syncing. This is definitely a step that could help the new social network take off, unlike Mastodon which, despite the advertising, currently has 2.5 million users. Instagram, for comparison, has more than 2 billion.