A report says the decentralized app uses pre-existing Instagram accounts.

Folks are spending less time on Twitter since Elon Musk bought the social media site last year, but there’s still plenty of demand for similar platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky. To that point, Meta has long been rumored to be building its own platform to rival Twitter. After months of speculation, there’s finally some details to go along with the rumors, according to digital media marketing expert Lia Haberman.

Haberman says the app is nearing completion and could launch as early as the end of June. She says that Meta has been meeting with select content creators to discuss the platform. One of these creators furnished Haberman with all kinds of info about the forthcoming app, calling it “Instagram for your thoughts.”

Instagram is the right word here, as it looks like the entire platform is built out of the popular photo-sharing social network. The decentralized app is said to work with current Instagram parameters, like usernames and passwords. So if you already have an Instagram account you should be able to sign right up and automatically sync up with your current followers. Your handle, bio and verification should all carry over from IG. Haberman says that even blocked Instagram accounts and hidden words transfer to the new platform.

This is also set to be a decentralized app that’ll integrate with other platforms like Mastodon, meaning you should be able to interact with users across multiple services without having to constantly switch between apps. The report indicates that text updates will be limited to 500 characters, which is less than an Instagram caption, but still plenty long enough to make a sarcastic comment or whatever.

You’ll likely be able to attach links, photos and videos up to five minutes long, which of course is much shorter than Twitter's recently launched two hour video-sharing feature. Just like Twitter and similar platforms, Meta’s service will have its own versions of likes, replies and reposts. Haberman got her hands on a leaked marketing slide that shows the app in action and, well, it looks a whole lot like Twitter, Bluesky and the rest, with a dash of Instagram's design scheme.

Back in March when these rumors first surfaced, Meta said it was indeed “exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates.” So this is coming, it’s just a matter of what it’ll look like and if it’ll be “the one” to dethrone Twitter. There's no name for the service yet, though within Meta it has a few codenames like Barcelona and P92.

Source:
courtesy of ENGADGET

by Lawrence Bonk

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