Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced on Friday that it is working on a new social network whose description seems to make it a potential future competitor to Twitter.
“We are thinking about a decentralized and independent social network allowing the sharing of written messages in real time,” said the group in a statement sent by Agence France-Presse, confirming information revealed by the Platformer site.
According to the latter, the new application would be designed to be interoperable with other networks of the same type, such as Mastodon, which has gained relative popularity since the takeover of Twitter by billionaire Elon Musk last October.
Mastodon operates through decentralized servers, with no central management or decision-making authority.
This would therefore be a major break with the strategy hitherto employed by the tech giants, which have always preferred to operate in a closed environment and with their own rules of use.
This announcement comes as Twitter has been losing momentum since the takeover by Mr. Musk, who laid off more than half of the employees.
Among the decisions taken by the main shareholder of Tesla and SpaceX, the return to the platform of controversial personalities who had been banned for remarks deemed offensive worried most of the site’s main advertisers, who have since announced to distance themselves.
The network is also regularly the victim of technical breakdowns.
The choice of interoperability envisaged by Meta also stands out from Twitter’s approach to the matter: in December, Elon Musk had briefly blocked the accounts of several users who shared links to other social networks, including Facebook, Instagram or Mastodon.