Meta Platforms previewed its in-development Twitter rival, called Project 92, for staff last week. Chief product officer Chris Cox demoed the decentralized app, which the company plans to launch through Instagram. Meta received feedback from creators and high-profile figures indicating they want “a sanely run” platform. Project 92 — also referred to internally as “P92” or “Barcelona” — bears similarities to Twitter but unlike that closed system will interoperate with other decentralized social apps like Mastodon and Bluesky. Although a specific timeline wasn’t shared, Cox reportedly said Meta plans to launch P92 “as soon as we can.”

BBC News notes the launch could come as quickly as later this month, and quotes a company spokesperson saying, “we believe there’s an opportunity for a separate space where creators and public figures can share timely updates about their interests.”

The Wall Street Journal writes that Cox told staff that Meta “is in talks to have people such as Oprah Winfrey and the Dalai Lama commit to using the app.”

In an all-hands meeting that took place live before thousands of employees and was streamed to tens of thousands more around the globe, Cox said P92 can use Instagram’s account system to automatically populate a user’s information, although it will be launched as a standalone app, writes The Verge, which shared screenshots of the user interface. “Threads” is reportedly one of the public-facing names under consideration for P92.

Project 92 will offer a feed with text posts of up to 500 characters that are capable of attaching links, photos, and videos, reports say. It is said to integrate with ActivityPub, a decentralized social protocol that offers a client/server API that facilitates creating, updating and deleting content, in addition to a federated server-to-server API that allows for delivery of notifications and content, which means developers can create apps that can synchronize across multiple decentralized platforms.

BBC News says P92 “could turn out to be a greater rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter than either Bluesky or Mastodon” by leveraging the popularity of Instagram. “The Instagram community is enormous,” BBC writes, adding that “Meta says it has around two billion users, which dwarfs the 300 million that are believed to use Twitter — although its figures can no longer be verified.”

If even a modest 25 percent of Instagram users wind up trying P92 “it will instantly become bigger than its older rival,” BBC says.