With the exception of its ambitions – decried – in the metaverse, the Meta group has hardly shone by its ability to raise the cheers of joy in recent years. And it is not by launching a clone of Twitter that Mark Zuckerberg’s company risks modernizing its image. However, it is indeed this track that Meta is preparing to explore, as one of its spokespersons said at the end of last week. “We are thinking about a decentralized and independent social network, allowing to share written messages in real time […] We believe there is a niche for a specific space where creators and public figures can share timely updates on their interests”did he declare.
It doesn’t take much to imagine a Twitter bis with Meta sauce, putting the text at the heart of the exchanges and seeking to capitalize on the enormous base of users of the services of its galaxy (in addition to Facebook, Messenger, Instagram and WhatsApp ). The moment seems to be considered opportune insofar as Twitter is weakened by its new owner, Elon Musk, who has drawn the wrath of a good part of the followers of the network by laying off more than two thirds of the employees and by applying precepts managers of a rare violence. From an economic point of view, it has also proved catastrophic, the number of advertisers having almost halved the turnover.
For the time being, we know almost nothing about this project for a new social network, except that it would be a service attached to Instagram (therefore to its user accounts), but whose operation would be decentralized. (with independent servers). This would potentially allow it to be interoperable with other messaging systems while responding favorably to the wishes of US and European public authorities, who are pushing for platform interoperability.
We also know that his supervision would have been entrusted to Adam Mosseri, current boss of Instagram, who has just launched the Notes, a format of short text messages…