Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey thinks of a Decentralized Social Media
Jack Dorsey revealed plans to create an open standard for decentralized social media.
Jack Dorsey divulged the plans for a decentralized social media through a series of Tweets. The plan majorly involves setting up a developer team named Blue Sky to carry out the project.
Dorsey said the team includes five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. Also, Twitter CTO, Parag Agrawal is in charge of recruiting.
Notably, the Twitter CEO said, “The goal involves Twitter ultimately becoming a client of this standard.”
Time to revive the initial vision
Dorsey also gave insights into why he believes the open-source standard plays a critical role in social media. He said Twitter started very open and many saw its potential to be a decentralized internet standard, similar to the SMTP (email protocol). However, due to different reasons which seemed reasonable at the time, the company took a different path and centralized Twitter, said Dorsey.
But, Dorsey claims many things changed over the years, and he believes it’s important to revive the initial vision now.
Dorsey went on to list some of the factors that changed over the years. First, he said new challenges that centralized solutions haven’t solved now exist.
Secondly, he mentioned that the value of social media happens to be moving away from content hosting and removal. He claims it’s now moving toward recommendation algorithms, directing one’s attention. He added that unfortunately, the algorithms happen to be proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives yet.
Additionally, the Twitter CEO said existing social media incentives frequently focus attention on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage. Therefore, neglecting positive conversation that informs and promotes health.
Importantly, Dorsey noted that new technologies emerged and make a decentralized social media approach more viable. He said blockchain falls among examples and points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting. As well as governance, and monetization. Although, he said that there’s still much work to be done. But the fundamentals already exists.
How does it affect Twitter?
Dorsey believes it’ll be a good one for Twitter. He claims it’ll enable Twitter to get access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation. As well as focus efforts on building open recommendation algorithms since they promote healthy conversation.
Additionally, he believes the initiative brings the added benefit of enforcing more innovation than in the past.
