Updates on Meta's Twitter competitor

According to The Verge, Meta's Chief Product Officer Chris Cox showed off screenshots of their Twitter competitor during a company wide meeting.

As rumoured earlier this year, the project is called Project 92 and based on Instagram and built on ActivityPub. It could be called "Threads" when it is launched to the public.

According to Chris Cox, “We’ve been hearing from creators and public figures who are interested in having a platform that is sanely run, that they believe that they can trust and rely upon for distribution,”. This is obviously referring to Twitter.

At this stage, they are working with celebrities to get commitments to using the app.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that this will be a big threat to Twitter. Current user count for it's main rival Mastodon remains low at about 12 million. Elon Musk has 120 million followers on Twitter, although many of those could be bots.

On the other hand, Instagram has roughly 2 billion accounts, and with this backing Threads/P92 could gain traction easily at the start.

Twitter has been problematic for some segments of it's users and while some have left, many remain on the platform because their networks are still there. It is notable that when Twitter undergoes some paroxysm, such as when Elon Musk takes over, Mastodon would see a surge in signups.

For the moment, Mastodon and Bluesky have their own obstacles to widespread adoption but if Threads/P92 looks promising at launch, this could lead to a bigger migration of Twitter users off the platform, breaking the existing network effects.

Basically, supply is created to meet a demand.

Watch this space.