Facebook now has 2 billion users

Almost 20 years in, Facebook is still growing. The social network now has 2 billion daily active users, Meta reported alongside its fourth-quarter earnings. The report marks the first time Facebook, which added 16 million users last quarter, has reached 2 billion daily users.

While Facebook isn’t the first Meta-owned platform to reach 2 billion daily users — WhatsApp recently crossed 2 billion DAUs — it does show that the company’s biggest source of ad revenue is still growing, even while Meta has made significant cuts to its business in recent months. CEO Mark Zuckerberg alluded to the company’s recent restructuring, which resulted in the elimination of more than 11,000 jobs, saying in a statement that “our management theme for 2023 is the ‘Year of Efficiency.’”

A graph of Facebook daily active user growth, showing that Facebook added 16 million new users in the 4th quarter of 2022, bringing the platform to 3 billion daily users.
Meta

But while Meta’s revenue has shrunk over the last year, the company’s $32.2 billion in revenue for the last quarter of 2022 was still slightly better than expected even as it was down 4 percent from last year.

During a call with analysts, Zuckerberg suggested that Meta will continue to make cuts as it prioritizes efficiency. “We’re going to be more proactive about cutting projects that aren’t performing or may no longer be as crucial,” he said. The CEO also said that generative AI would be a priority for Meta in the year ahead.

“Generative AI is an extremely exciting new area with so many different applications,” Zuckerberg said. “And one of my goals for Meta is to build on our research to become a leader in generative AI.”

Meta also continues to lose vast amounts of money on its metaverse investments. Reality Labs, the division overseeing its VR, AR and metaverse projects, lost $4.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2022, and nearly $14 billion for the whole year, Meta reported. and the company, once again, confirmed that it expects to lose even more money on Reality Labs in the year ahead. “We still expect our full year Reality Labs losses to increase in 2023,” Meta CFO Susan Li said. “And we’re going to continue to invest meaningfully in this area given the significant long term opportunities that we see.” 

While the Reality Labs losses have contributed to Meta’s revenue slowdown over the last year, Zuckerberg also said that he believes the company is in the midst of a “pretty rapid phase change,” compared to years past. “We can’t just treat everything like it’s hyper growth,” he said. “There are gonna be some areas that are going to be very rapidly growing, or that are very, kind of, future investments that we want to make.”

Twitter opens public appeals for suspended accounts

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he said he would offer “amnesty” to previously banned and suspended accounts. Since then, he’s restored dozens of controversial high-profile users, including Donald Trump (who has yet to return to the platform), comedian Kathy Griffin, and a number of whitenationalists and members of the far-right.

Now, Twitter is opening a public-facing appeals process, which will allow anyone whose account has previously been suspended to request reinstatement. The company posted a link to an online form accessible to users who are able to log into an account that’s previously been locked or suspended.

Earlier this week, the company indicated a new appeals process would be coming as part of its policy to take “less severe actions” against rule-breaking accounts. “Going forward, we will take less severe actions, such as limiting the reach of policy-violating Tweets or asking you to remove Tweets before you can continue using your account,” the company said. “Account suspension will be reserved for severe or ongoing, repeat violations of our policies.”

Twitter added that appeals would be “evaluated under our new criteria for reinstatement.” But it didn’t elaborate on what that criteria would be, or how long the process might take. The company says it expects to receive a “high volume” of requests and that reinstated requests are expected to “follow our rules.”

Like users, app developers are fleeing Twitter for Mastodon

When Twitter quietly updated its developer policies to ban third-party clients from its platform, it abruptly closed an important chapter of Twitter’s history. Unlike most of its counterparts, which tightly control what developers are able to access, Twitter has a long history with independent app makers.

Now, the developers of some Twitter clients are turning their attention to another upstart platform: Mastodon. This week, Tapbots, the studio behind Tweebot, released Ivory, a Mastodon client based on its longtime Twitter app. Matteo Villa, the developer behind Twitter app Fenix, is testing a Mastodon client of his own called Wooly. Junyu Kuang, the indie developer behind Twitter client Spring is working on a Mastodon app called Mona. Shihab Mehboob, developer of Twitter app Aviary, is close to launching a Mastodon client called Mammoth.

The one-time Twitter developers join a growing group of independent app makers who have embraced Mastodon, the open-source social network that’s seen explosive growth since Elon Musk took over Twitter. The decentralized service now has more than 1.5 million users across nearly 10,000 servers. That, coupled with Mastodon’s open-source, “API-first” approach, has attracted dozens of developers eager to put their own spin on the service.

A screenshot from Mastodon's website showing 22 different clients made by third-party developers.
Mastodon

Paul Haddad, one of the developers behind Tweetbot and Ivory, says Tapbots started working on a Mastodon client late last year as they started to grow nervous about the future of Twitter’s developer platform.

“They [Twitter] had absolutely been making huge strides and opening up their API platform, but clients like ours were always going to be second- or third-class citizens,” says Haddad. “Whereas with Mastodon, that’s absolutely not the case.”

Thomas Ricouard, the developer behind Ice Cubes, a Mastodon app that launched earlier this month, says that he had considered building an app with Twitter’s API in the past, but decided against it because it was “looking more and more limited as the days passed.” At the same time, he says he noticed fewer and fewer familiar faces on his Twitter timeline. “Loving open source software,” he says, “I quickly saw the opportunity [for Mastodon].”

Ice Cubes launched in the App Store January 19th, and it has already won the praise of reviewers and has dozens of contributors on GitHub. Even Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, who has been more active on Mastodon lately, uses the app.

On its part, Mastodon has welcomed developer interest even though it maintains its own mobile apps. “It’s exciting because it means that a lot of very talented people are investing their time and resources into building on the platform and ecosystem that we have built up,” Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko tells Engadget. “Third party applications are incredibly valuable for a platform because that’s where the power users go … it benefits everybody because the power users are the people who create the content that everybody reads.”

Developers’ contributions also have the potential to influence the direction of the platform itself. Just as Twitter’s earliest developers had an outsize impact on the service, some developers now see an opportunity to similarly influence Mastodon.

Both Ricouard and Haddad noted that official Mastodon apps currently don’t support quoting — the Mastodon equivalent of a quote tweet — but some clients, like Ice Cubes and Mona, do. “I think the client developers are able to implement that feature within the app, we’re probably going to push it to go higher up on the radar of the Mastodon server developers,” Haddad predicts. Mastodon so far hasn’t publicly committed to adding quotes but Rochko, who was once adamantly against the feature, recently said he’s considering it.

Mastodon developers have experimented with other unique additions, too. Ice Cubes has Chat GPT-powered prompts that will spice up the text of your post (or “toot” as they are known to longtime Mastodon users). Wooly groups notifications in batches, similar to Twitter. Tapbots is working on a Mac app that will sync with Ivory’s iOS app, much like Tweetbot did across platforms.

“Mastodon is in the [same] early phase Twitter was, where third party apps will have a big impact on the future product focus and development,” says Ricouard.

Rochko says that while he’s happy to see the growing number of Mastodon clients, he’s not in a hurry to try to replicate their features. Mastodon is still a nonprofit with a small team and a lengthy product roadmap. “It’s definitely interesting to see different ideas tested out and experimented with and I think that long term, there’s probably going to be influence over the official apps,” he says.

Still, not every former Twitter client developer is eager to start over on Mastodon. “I’m not sure if I want to create a Mastodon app but you should definitely check out those other developers who have,” Tweetings said in a farewell post on Twitter. Twitterrific’s developers are also unsure if Mastodon fits into their future plans.

Much will likely depend on if Mastodon is able to maintain its current growth and continue to attract new users. And as much as many former Twitter users see it as a replacement, Mastodon is structured very differently, and not everyone finds it as user-friendly as Twitter. Rochko, who started Mastodon in 2017, says he’s optimistic because the site continues to add influential users.

“What’s exciting to me about the latest wave of users on Mastodon is not the numbers but the who. The people who have joined from various journalist organizations, media organizations, politicians, actors, writers, and just you know, famous internet people — like the olden days.”

Donald Trump will get his Facebook and Instagram accounts back ‘in the coming weeks’

More than two years after Meta extended former President Donald Trump’s “indefinite” suspension from Facebook, the company has opted to reinstate his account. In a statement, Meta said Trump would be able to access his Facebook and Instagram accounts in the “coming weeks,” but that there would be “new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”

The decision comes after Trump’s campaign had reportedly pushed for the former president to be allowed back on Facebook ahead of the upcoming presidential primaries.

Trump was originally booted from Facebook in the aftermath of the attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, after publicly praising the rioters. Meta’s handling of the initial suspension, which it quickly extended from a 24-hour ban to an “indefinite” suspension, was heavily criticized, including by its own Oversight Board. In its decision weighing in on Trump’s suspension, the board slammed Meta for not following its own rules and trying to “avoid its responsibilities.”

Meta then revisited the suspension, and said it would last for at least two years. However, the company confirmed that Trump would eventually be allowed back on Facebook. Nick Clegg, Meta’s top policy official, said at the time the former president would be “subject to new enhanced penalties” for future policy violations.

Now, Clegg says that Trump and other public figures who have been reinstated following suspensions “related to civil unrest” will face new suspensions, lasting for at least a month, for future offenses. He added Meta would also take steps to limit the reach of Trump’s posts if they contribute “to the sort of risk that materialized on January 6th, such as content that delegitimizes an upcoming election or is related to QAnon.” While Meta may not remove those posts entirely, he said the company would consider removing the share button and blocking them from the company’s advertising and recommendations systems.

Clegg also confirmed that the company’s controversial “newsworthiness” policies could continue to apply to Trump. “In the event that Mr. Trump posts content that violates the letter of the Community Standards but, under our newsworthy content policy, we assess there is a public interest in knowing that Mr. Trump made the statement that outweighs any potential harm, we may similarly opt to restrict the distribution of such posts but leave them visible on Mr. Trump’s account,” Clegg wrote. 

Meta’s decision comes just months after Elon Musk also restored the former president’s Twitter account. Trump has so far declined to restart his Twitter habit — he decamped to Truth Social last year — but is reportedly planning to return, according to a recent report in Rolling Stone. While the former president was known to favor Twitter, his Facebook following was also an important asset to both of his previous campaigns. 

Trump’s suspension was also the first major test of Meta’s Oversight Board, which the company formed to help it weigh in on thorny content moderation and policy decisions. In a statement Wednesday, the board said that it had “no role” in the company’s decision to reinstate Trump, and that it plans to “publish a fuller analysis of this case in a future quarterly transparency report.”

Twitter admits it’s breaking third-party apps, cites ‘long-standing API rules’

Several days after Twitter abruptly cut a number of third-party apps off from its API, the company has quietly acknowledged the move. “Twitter is enforcing its long-standing API rules,” the company said in a tweet from its developer account. “That may result in some apps not working.”

However, the company offered no explanation which “long-standing API rules” developers of apps like Twitterrific and Tweetbot were violating. It also doesn’t address why some smaller third-party Twitter apps are still up and running. Twitter no longer has a communications team.

The company’s two-sentence acknowledgement that it had cut off access to several longtime developers follows a report in The Information that the moves was an “intentional” one. Some have speculated that Twitter made the decision because third-party clients don’t show ads and may be perceived as siphoning off already declining ad revenue from the company. Twitter, under Elon Musk, likely has less enthusiasm for supporting its developers. As Twitterrific’s team pointed out, many of the company’s employees overseeing the developer platform were cut in mass layoffs last year. 

For now, Twitter developers say they are in the dark about why Twitter has cut them off. “We haven’t heard anything from Twitter,” Twitterrific creator Craig Hockenberry told Engadget. “We have been respectful of their API rules, as published, for the past 16 years. We have no knowledge that these rules have changed recently or what those changes might be.”

Tweetbot maker Tapbots responded similarly. “Tweetbot has been around for over 10 years, we’ve always complied with the Twitter API rules,” the developer said. “If there’s some existing rule that we need to comply with, we’d be happy to do so, if possible. But we do need to know what it is…”

Update 1/17 4:24 PM ET: Added comments from Craig Hockenberry and Tapbots.

Twitter could launch in-app ‘coins’ to help creators make money

It seems Elon Musk’s Twitter is working on a new scheme to make money from the platform. The service appears to be experimenting with an in-app currency called “coins” meant to help creators earn money from the platform, according to screenshots shared by two app researchers.

The feature has been spotted in recent days by Jane Manchun Wong and Nima Owji, app researchers who often publish images of unreleased features. According to their posts, coins appear to be an extension of Twitter’s existing tipping feature. “Coins allow you to support creators who Tweet great content,” reads a screenshot shared by Wong and Owji. An image shared by Owji back in December showed a new “Coins” tab in the same section where users can keep track of their tips.

For now, it’s unclear exactly what Twitter’s plans are for coins or when the feature could launch. The company, which no longer employs communications staff, didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the screenshots suggest Twitter is at least considering featuring coins prominently in its app as both Wong and Owji spotted it in the main sidebar.

But coins may not be just for tipping. Wong also spotted an “Awards” feature, which allows people to use coins to buy in-app gifts for others. According to the image shared by Wong, users would be able to buy gifts for as little as one coin (called “Mind Blown”) or as much as 5000 (called “Gold”). It’s not clear how much coins will cost, though Twitter would presumably get a cut of revenue generated from coin purchases.

So far, Elon Musk doesn’t seem to have publicly weighed in on coins or awards, but he has spoken broadly about wanting more ways for creators to be rewarded. He’s said that Twitter Blue revenue would potentially “give Twitter a revenue stream to reward content creators” and that “creator monetization for all forms of content” is also in the works.

It’s also worth noting that despite the “coins’ moniker, the feature doesn’t seem to have any cryptocurrency tie-ins, at least for now. “Twitter Coin is still under development and we don’t even have any evidence that it’s something related to crypto,” Owji noted. “Don’t let the scammers fool you.”

Parler has reportedly cut ‘majority’ of staff in recent weeks

Parler parent company Parlement Technologies has cut the “majority” of its staff in recent weeks, according to a new report. The Verge reports that the company has slashed close to 75 percent of staff, including several executives, in recent weeks with…