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Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced Friday that it is developing a new “text sharing” social media platform that could compete with Twitter.
Since billionaire Elon Musk took over Twitter in October, the influential website has experienced outages, layoffs, and advertisers fleeing due to a lack of content moderation.
However, no major alternative to Twitter has emerged thus far, leaving global leaders, politicians, celebrities, and businesses with little choice but to continue communicating via the platform.
Following reports on news websites Platformer and Money control in India, Meta confirmed on Friday that works on the new platform had begun.
“We’re looking into a standalone, decentralized social network for sharing text updates,” Meta said in a brief email.
“We believe there is an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests,” the company said in a statement.
According to media reports, Meta’s new app would use technology that would allow it to communicate with the niche network Mastodon and other platforms.
This would be a significant departure from the norm for tech behemoths, where platforms like Instagram and YouTube are kept behind technological walls and run on company servers under strict rules.
Mastodon is powered by decentralized computing servers, with no centralized management or authority making decisions.
Musk briefly banned Twitter accounts that provided links to other social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Mastodon, in December.
