Akihabara News (Tokyo) — Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is working with Mastodon on a longshot bid to take on Twitter.
Last October, Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk completed a controversial takeover of the social media platform Twitter, an event which drove many long-time users off the network in protest. Since that time, there has been headline after headline criticizing Musk’s decisions and his heavy-handed management style.
Last November, Musk himself raised the possibility that Twitter could go bankrupt by the end of 2023.
Twitter has always struggled with profitability, but it nevertheless established itself firmly as a leading social media platform for journalists, policymakers, and political discussions. At a government level, it exercises an outsized impact in relation to its size as measured by its number of users.
Since his takeover, Musk has been ruthless in regard to staffing and personnel issues. More than 50% of Twitter’s workforce has either been fired or driven to resign from the company.
This has included engineers and others who were critical to the technical operation of the platform. As a result, problems have routinely appeared in its daily operations and user services.
This, in turn, has only heightened criticism of Musk’s leadership.
The Twitter alternative which gained the most attention at the end of last year was Mastodon, a decentralized platform utilizing the ActivityPub protocol. This enables data exchange and communication between independent servers.
Due to the spike in interest, Mastodon, as of this month, has about 6.5 million users, but only about 1.3 million are regarded as being “active users.”
In comparison, Twitter boasts hundreds of millions of active users. The exact figure is disputed, but most accounts put it above 400 million people.
Meta has yet to release a name for its potential Twitter challenger, but it is known that it aims to utilize the same ActivityPub protocol as does Mastodon. This platform will in some way carry Instagram branding.
As should be apparent, whatever the problems of Musk-run Twitter have been, Meta faces a formidable challenge in trying to capture this market.
There will be little leeway for mistakes, either technical issues or public relations fiascos. This could include controversies over platform moderation; a matter which has tripped up more than one social media platform. This is especially true because public opinion on free speech is itself deeply divided.
Another major challenge will be marketing. Even possessing the advantage of operating the Facebook and Instagram platforms, Meta will need to generate enough public interest to convince large numbers of people to register and to begin using an entire new social media platform.
Since this platform will be similar to what Twitter already offers, this could prove to be a tall order.
