The largest company in the world of social networks, Meta, in addition to Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook, wants to offer users another social network – the Indian portal MoneyControl learned this by seeing an internal document describing the new project, codenamed P92. Not long after they published the first information about it, Meta officially confirmed that the project is under development, and revealed some more details about it.
Decentralized social network
What we know for now is that it is a new social network, somewhat different from Facebook or Instagram, but more similar to Twitter. According to Meta, the plan is to develop “an independent decentralized social network for sharing text content”. The company believes that there is room on the market for such a network, which will be a special space where public figures and content creators can express themselves and publish information about their interests and activities, all in real-time.
The new network would rely on the ActivityPub protocol, on which Mastodon and several other similar social networks are based. According to the plans, revealed by MoneyControl, this “textual” network would be linked to Instagram by name and would be logged into it with the same user account.
In terms of functionality, it would enable the sharing of short texts, which could also include emoticons, links, and possibly images and videos. The sharing of content would only be possible on selected servers, which would therefore assume the function of decentralization, but it is not clear whether users from one of these servers would be able to interact with those who chose another server. Liking, commenting, and sharing content are also planned.
The fact that many users want to “escape” from Twitter, which is changing significantly under Elon Musk, certainly served as a motivation for launching such a platform. Mastodon, also a decentralized social network, was offered as an alternative to many, but its technical requirements turned away less skilled users.
Meta, on the other hand, is no stranger to copying other people’s ideas – let’s remind you that they took stories from Snapchat and reels from TikTok, and then spread them across all their channels. The latest such action is the introduction of paid user account verification, which was Musk’s idea from Twitter. The next step might be for them to completely take over the idea of a microblogging service and integrate it into their own ecosystem.
