Oh, goody.
"We're exploring a standalone decentralized social network for sharing text updates."
Yet another group of "geniuses" is re-inventing IRC.
I can't wait.
Not content to sit on the sidelines while Twitter falters, Facebook parent Meta is working on a text-focused competitor, based on the decentralized bones of fediverse favorite Mastodon. Reportedly dubbed "P92" internally, the app may well interoperate with Mastodon by supporting the ActivityPub protocol, and could be Instagram …
The more I am of the opinion that since he took over Twatter, Elon has been trying to out do Gerald Ratner for the title of 'King of destroying your business'.
Keep going Elon. The sooner you are in hock for all that dosh that you borrowed from the banks the better.
You might do well to remember... 'A fool and his money are soon parted'.
If you could turn the clock back a year, so that you could avoid this costly mistake, would you?
Distributed social media is inevitable. You can do about 90% of Facebook by extending an e-mail client to include encryption and rich media. Because you are using the e-mail protocol, you lose the costs and the govt/activist aggro of paying for central servers, bandwidth, censorship and spying on users. You can still monetise your service, but with a user-friendly, consensual advertising model.
I've been advocating this for ages now. I'm just disappointed that GAFA is doing it. It would have been a great opportunity for someone else to become part of GAFA 2.
The opensource world has already done a Failbook style frontend for the Fediverse https://friendi.ca/
Stats about follower count and reach don't apply in the non-commercial world & yet the businesses seem to think they know best.
For example, Mastodon and PeerTube is doing pretty well for me. In the past week I've had more interaction on Mastodon alone than I've had on the old bird site for the past year. That's with no algorithms pushing content to people.
Shows how many don't want stuff pushed to them - oh no adverts, so they can't make money... a win for us