Meta teased a standalone app in a “response to Twitter” during a company-wide meeting on Thursday, and a top exec on the Facebook parent company has already taunted Twitter boss Elon Musk by saying the upcoming rival can be “sanely run.”
The app, internally code-named Project 92, will launch through Instagram and is rumored to be called Threads upon its release, in line with The Verge.
The forthcoming app was demonstrated during an all-hands meeting on Thursday led by Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox, who called the project “our response to Twitter,” the outlet reported.
Cox is already taking jabs at Musk and his handling of Twitter, which the Tesla and SpaceX CEO purchased in October for $44 billion and has since touted as “a spot where all voices are heard.”
“We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who’re serious about having a platform that’s sanely run, that they consider that they’ll trust and depend upon for distribution,” Cox said through the meeting, in line with The Verge.
He said the goal of coding the app, which began in January, was to be certain that that creators have a “stable place to construct and grow their audiences” while making a platform with a deal with “safety, ease of use [and] reliability.”
Cox went on to boast concerning the celebrities which have already committed to using the app, like Oprah, the Dalai Lama, and DJ Slime.
Meta will make the app available “as soon as we are able to,” Cox added.
Project 92 reportedly uses Instagram’s account system to mechanically populate users’ information, and integrates with ActivityPub so users of the brand new app can take their accounts and followers with them to other apps supported by the decentralized social networking protocol.
The combination inherently makes the app a decentralized one — like Twitter rival Mastodon which launched in April and supports independent servers that create their very own rules about things like content moderation.
It should be the primary interconnected platform of its kind under Mark Zuckerberg’s umbrella of platforms, which incorporates Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
The upcoming app could have a leg up on Twitter due to its alliance with Instagram, which could allow it to leverage the photo-sharing app’s greater than 1 billion users, in line with Statista.
Twitter, meanwhile, has about 360 million users and has been riddled with controversy since Musk stepped in as boss, slashed half the corporate’s workforce, scared advertisers off the platform, and outraged high-profile users who made blue checks a pay-to-play feature.
As of April, users who once had their identity verified by a free blue check that distinguished them from imposters now need to pay a monthly fee to maintain the prized badge. The price of a blue checkmark now ranges from $8 a month for individual web users to a starting price of $1,000 monthly for a company.
Most recently, Musk found someone “silly enough” to succeed him: NBCUniversal recruit Linda Yaccarino.
She’ll be tasked with propping up the ad revenue that has reportedly plunged 59% this yr and could have to scramble to fulfill sales projections — which the struggling company has incessantly fallen in need of, sometimes by as much as 30%.
Yaccarino assumed the role on Monday — weeks sooner than expected — and has already began constructing out a trusted “flock,” starting with former colleague Joe Benarroch, who stepped right into a senior business operations role.
