Instagram is planning to release a text-focused Twitter rival that is rumoured to land next month.
A range of Twitter alternatives and rivals have emerged following Elon Musk’s calamitous takeover of the social media, ranging from the laboriously complex Mastodon to more simple offerings.
However, Instagram’s mooted alternative has one big advantage — an extant user base.
Lia Haberman, a lecturer at UCLA Extension, had been given a sneak peek into the app that is reportedly codenamed P92.
You spend days working on a TikTok exclusive and it gets no attention. You get a sneak peek at Instagram’s new text-app and it blows up.
Posting all the headlines below to keep track of coverage
*I wasn’t even going to lead my newsletter with this 😅 pic.twitter.com/QIdLwDANsq
— Lia Haberman (@liahaberman) May 20, 2023
The app would seem to borrow heavily from Instagram’s existing look and feel but will function like Twitter. Like Instagram, Haberman said that the app would have creator control and account safety features that mean any words or accounts a user has blocked on Instagram would carry over onto P92.
Meta confirmed in March that it was “exploring a standalone decentralised social network for sharing test updates.”
The decentralised model would mean that rather than being controlled by a single corporate entity such as Meta, control would be shared across servers and users. As a result, there would be fewer widespread outages but it would mean that no single authority would be in charge of moderating content or users.
This change in approach would mark a significant change for Meta but might also mean that P92 (or whatever it ends up being called) would fall into the same moderation pitfalls as Twitter, which saw advertisers reluctantly leave the platform following Musk’s takeover.
Posts on P92 would have a 500-character limit, up from the 280-character limit on regular tweets but way down from the 10,000-character limit for tweets from Twitter Blue subscribers.
Social media consultant Matt Navarra said that Meta is approaching high-profile influencers and celebs with a focus on actors, producers, writers, directors, showrunners, athletes and comedians, to give them early access to P92 for a trial before it is released to the public.
