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Mark Zuckerberg could be launching his own rival platform on Twitter in the coming months, all part of his master plan to capitalize on user chaos and discontent led by Elon Musk.
Coding began last January at Facebook’s parent company Meta on the new social app, codenamed Project 92, as Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox told a company-wide meeting earlier this month.
And big celebrities are already in talks to post on the platform, including broadcasting legend Oprah Winfrey and Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama.
“We’ve heard from creators and public figures interested in a platform that’s soundly managed,” Cox told Meta employees, issuing a thinly veiled critique of Musk’s Twitter operations — a dig that drew cheers from Meta’s assembled staff , according to The edge.
News reports suggest that the public name for Meta’s new app could be “Threads.” Threads will reportedly have a 500 character limit per post, more in line with Twitter’s original ethos
The rich, the famous and the influential, Cox said, are desperate for a new platform “that they believe they can rely on and rely on for distribution.”
Reports suggest that the new app’s public name could become “Threads,” and it will feature a scrolling text scroll just like Twitter, along with buttons similar to both the Like and Retweet functions.
Threads will also move closer to Twitter’s original 180 character limit, with a slightly longer, but still short, limit of 500 characters per post. As a social media industry inside put it, Threads will look like’remarkably similar to Twitter.’
Many regular Twitter users, as well as the platform’s large community of science experts, academics, and even former NASA astronauts, have also been searching for alternatives in recent months.
Mastodon – a free, decentralized and open-source microblogging platform – has increasingly become a haven for scientists hoping for more down-to-earth conversations among themselves.
“I’ve been much more active there than on Twitter,” says astronomer Mark McCaughrean of the European Space Agency. Science late last year, after his own move to Mastodon.
Many have described the platform as a more democratic alternative to Twitter, as Mastodon’s decentralized structure means that no single person, company or server has complete control over its activities.
Many Twitter users, scientific experts and even former astronauts have also been looking for alternatives in recent months. Former NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez pledged to jump off the platform amid Musk’s plans to turn ‘blue check’ verification into a pay-to-play scheme
Big celebrities are already in talks to entrust their posts to the Meta’s new Twitter rival, codenamed “Project 92,” including Oprah (right) and the Dalai Lama (left)
Last November, Mastodon reported more than 70,000 new signups on a single Friday, in direct response to Musk’s completed $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
“If it gets too toxic and offensive,” Emory University virologist Boghuma Titanji also told Science during Twitter’s raucous transition, “I’ll leave to maintain my well-being and consider other platforms.”
Former NASA astronaut Jose Hernandez also vowed to jump off the platform amid Musk’s plans to turn “blue check” verification into a pay-to-play scheme, though Hernandez nonetheless remains an active tweeter to this day.
But Musk has also drawn praise from those, such as House Republican Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Senator John Kennedy on Capitol Hill, who see the billionaire as a free-speech advocate for reviving the First Amendment rights to the platform.
Musk, That’s what Senator Kennedy said last December, had taken a “very brave stance on the First Amendment” since taking over Twitter. “He’s as tough as a fir tree.”
“Project 92,” which Cox explicitly described as “our answer to Twitter,” will be integrated with Instagram’s current account system, allowing Instagram users to automatically transfer their followers and user information directly to the new microblogging site.
It will also integrate with Mastodon and other decentralized platforms that use the same ActivityPub API system as Mastodon, Cox said.
The design of the app, which social media consultant Matt Navarra says could be called Threads, “is strikingly similar to Twitter,” or very old Twitter, as Musk’s version continues to experiment with everything from longer posts to newsletters to exclusives. live streams. broadcasts.
Navarra, who claimed to have inside knowledge of Meta’s plans, told them the The Sydney Morning Herald that Meta’s Twitter killer could be launched as early as “late this month or early next month.”
“They’ve been training people for a while,” Navarra said. “I’m sure they talked to a British celebrity and some big American stars.”
That said, the only name revealed by Meta’s chief product officer Cox as a slot for their new platform was Minneapolis, Minnesota-born music producer DJ Slime, who Cox bragged had committed to using the app.
Cox told the company’s employees that Meta’s goal for “Project 92” was to create an app that emphasized “security, ease of use, and reliability” to ensure creators had a “stable place to connect their audiences.” to build and grow’.
Meta, Cox said, will make the app public as soon as possible.