Featured in this episode of Chaos Lever
Smelling blood in the water many, many, many months late, Facebook is working hard on a skunkworks project that will allegedly be a direct competitor to Twitter.
Twitter, which everyone hates, is on what we can all see is a probably unavoidable death spiral. Facebook, which everyone hates, is finally taking notice. The Instagram team appears to be working on a project codenamed “P92” that would conceivably be a Mastodon people have actually heard of.
It is being designed to be decentralized, but don’t worry- you’d use your Instagram account to log into it so Zuck will still be able to spy on you with his usual lack of care for your privacy or protecting your data. Still- it’s likely that only a company with the userbase of a Facebook will create the network effects that are clearly required for a Social Media project to work.
For comparison, Mastodon and the Fediverse only have approximately 2.6 million users- Facebook has 2 billion, worldwide. The P92 project would allegedly take advantage of ActivityPub, which is what powers the Fediverse. So Facebook, while still unavoidably awful, might have the sway to make a decentralized tool a reality. Baby steps.