The basic story of Meta is that, after creating Facebook, which grew into one of the largest advertising businesses in the world, Mark Zuckerberg fortified his empire by acquiring fast-growing competitors and ruthlessly cloning the ones he couldn’t get. Of the acquisitions, Instagram and WhatsApp turned out to be enormously successful. The clones were more complicated. There’s Threads, the Twitter clone, which Meta claims is used by 500 million people a month but which seems to exert virtually no influence on the internet or the world around it. And while Instagram was an acquisition, its current form is arguably the result of two cloning attempts: one of Snapchat, in the form of Stories; the other of TikTok, as Reels. Mostly, though, the cloning attempts haven’t gone much of anywhere. Remember Facebook Camera, the pre-acquisition Instagram-alike from 2012? How about Poke, the early Snapchat clone? Or Slingshot, the other Snapchat clone? Paper, the Flipboard knockoff? Lasso, which was sort of like TikTok? Hobbi, which was inspired by Pinterest? Bonfire, which tried to be Houseparty? How about Live Audio Rooms, the Clubhouse rip?

This isn’t an exhaustive list, and it’s still expanding, particularly if you include the app-shaped output of the company’s massive, haphazard tagalong AI efforts. As of last month, you can download a Reddit-ish Meta app called Forum. And soon, according to the New York Times, an app that’s kind of like Kalshi and Polymarket:

[Zuckerberg] recently dispatched a small team at his company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, two employees with knowledge of the matter said. Users would not wager money,........

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