Meta, which is run by Mark Zuckerberg, is moving forward with plans to start a Twitter competitor. This is because public figures, like the Dalai Lama and Oprah Winfrey, are said to want a similar platform that is “sanely run.”
A report from the tech news site the Verge says that the standalone app’s secret name is “Project92,” and that its public name could be “Threads.”
The chief product officer of Meta, Chris Cox, reportedly said at an internal meeting on Thursday that the app was “Facebook and Instagram‘s answer to Twitter.”
Cox was quoted as saying, “We’ve heard from creators and public figures that they want a platform that is run in a sane way and that they can trust and rely on for distribution.” This seems to be a reference to how Twitter is run by Elon Musk.
Cox is said to have said that Meta was talking to Winfrey, who has more than 42 million Twitter followers, and the Dalai Lama, who has almost 19 million, about using the app. He also said that writing for the app started in January and that it would be released “as soon as we can.”
The Verge said that the app would work with ActivityPub, which is a technology that also runs Mastodon, a Twitter competitor that is a decentralized group of thousands of sites, and makes it possible for social networks to work together. In theory, this would let people who use the new Meta app move their accounts and friends to other apps that support ActivityPub, like Mastodon.
According to earlier rumors, the app will be like Instagram, and users will be able to sign in with their Instagram username and password. Their followers, user bio, and verification will also move over to the new app.
Cox said that the app was made to be “safe, easy to use, and reliable” and to give creators a “stable place to build and grow their audiences.”
The Verge shared a screenshot of the app’s interface, which looked a lot like Twitter’s. There were blue ticks, personal pictures, and buttons to like, reply, and retweet.
Twitter has had a rough time since Musk took over, but the CEO of Tesla says the number of users hasn’t gone down since he bought the company in October. Musk said that the number of daily active users had hit an all-time high of more than 250 million just a few weeks after he bought Twitter.
But as an advertising-based business, Twitter is having trouble making money. Concerns like a drop in the quality of moderation on the platform and a botched relaunch of Twitter’s subscription service, which led to a lot of fake verified accounts, led to an advertising boycott.
