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December 11, 2019 04:10 pm

Twitter Is Funding Independent Effort To Develop an Open and Decentralized Standard For Social Media

Twitter is funding a small team of researchers to build an "open and decentralized standard for social media," with the goal of making Twitter a client for that standard. CEO Jack Dorsey announced the news and laid out his reasoning in a tweet thread this morning, although he acknowledged that the process could take years. The project is called Bluesky. Dorsey said: Twitter was so open early on that many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard, like SMTP (email protocol). For a variety of reasons, all reasonable at the time, we took a different path and increasingly centralized Twitter. But a lot's changed over the years. First, we're facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people. Second, the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one's attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can't choose or build alternatives. Yet. Third, existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health. Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there. Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal is tasked with finding a lead for the project, who will build a team of up to five people. The Bluesky account's only tweet quotes Dorsey with the comment "lo" -- a reference to the first message ever sent on the internet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/wRtU0b-Hr48/twitter-is-funding-independent-effort-to-develop-an-open-and-decentralized-standard-for-so

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