Meta is Working on a Twitter Alternative

During the Lex Fridman podcast, Mark Zuckerberg expressed his interest in working on a social-media platform that is completely text-based, similar to Twitter. The competitor to Twitter with a condename P92, as mentioned by Fridman, is a project that Zuckerberg said would be a platform for sharing the information important to society. 

“I think Twitter has not lived up to what I would have thought its full potential should be,” said Zuckerberg. He said that maybe Elon Musk, the current owner of Twitter also felt the same way and is one of the reasons why he bought the platform. 

Zuckerberg further said that the open and federated approach for such a platform is potentially interesting, comparing the social media with the likes of Mastodon and Bluesky, which are decentralised social media platforms, built as an alternative to Twitter. “Something that melds some of those ideas [Mastodon and Bluesky] with the graph and identity system that people have already cultivated on Instagram could be a kind of very welcome contribution to that space,” he added. 

Zuckerberg said that Twitter should have a billion people on its platform now, or whatever the alternative is brought to the market. He believes that, “text is very accessible for people to transmit ideas,” and is a very good format for discussion. He explains that platforms like TikTok, which has video as the primary content on the platform, text and comments do not be the first class of the conversation, as they get dominated by the videos. 

The Meta head said that the company has been working on a lot of projects simultaneously and this is also something that an entire team is focusing on. It is possible that we might see a text-based social media platform from Meta, when it already has Instagram and WhatsApp under its belt right now. This might even be decentralised, as Zuckerberg has clearly shown interest in the space.

Chris Cox, the head of product at Meta told The Verge a few days back that the company is building Project 92, as a direct alternative to Twitter, as a lot of people have been unhappy with the platform.