Facebook designers have suffered quite a bit from dealing with very inconsistent media format: comments on one photo in an album are one of the obvious ones, or a poster criticizing and sharing a video and comments assuming the author shot the video is familiar to anyone with less media-savvy friends. Limiting media forms to consistent sets makes sense to have a smoother experience.
Facebook, and later Instagram once the first one was burned, has done a lot to have a social graph that makes sense: actual people and well-established pseudonyms, famous people and brands, etc. It’s the Social part of what is known internally as “The Graph” and a very crucial asset, something that was expected to be shared across properties: Facebook and Instagram, of course (hence the horrifying confusing relation between your Facebook account with your civil name and your pseudonymous account on Instagram, outing a few people that way), but also the MetaVerse lately and yet again with some controversy. WhatsApp fought against having the Social part of the graph as a default because WA had its own graph; that was a tough battle. It’s not fully isolated: WA Shopping leverages Inventory, the Things part of the graph, massively so.
Despite all that drama, this confirms that Facebook wants to leverage its Graph further, specifically Instagram’s—likely a victory from Ad Partners who want brands to feel comfortable early and spend fast.
The spaghetti logo looks nothing like what I have on my screen, so I think it’s a good one (Instagram gradient was to avoid having to deal with Facebook’s curse of starting very distinct, to be one of the too many blue apps far too soon). The name starting with 't' could be a way to capitalize on people who search by app name and their muscle memory that the app with ranty posts is called t-something.
