Jack Dorsey, Twitter CEO, on December 11 announced that the company will fund an independent team to spearhead plans to build a decentralised social media infrastructure. The team, named Bluesky, will comprise of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers. The team will be tasked with creating a set of open and decentralized technical standards for social media platforms.
For social media, we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide.
Bluesky will follow a similar model to Square Crypto, a Bitcoin-focused dream team, operating independently from Jack’s fintech company, Square.
Jack provided a breakdown of the vision through a series of tweets stating that the ultimate goal is to create a set of decentralized processes rather than proprietary structures that any social media platform can employ. In one tweet Jack stated that
There are MANY challenges to make this work that Twitter would feel right becoming a client of this standard. Which is why the work must be done transparently in the open, not owned by any single private corporation, furthering the open & decentralized principles of the internet.
The twitter supremo contends that social media platforms are currently faced with new challenges that they cannot meet with centralized solutions. However, he feels that these can be effectively dealt with on decentralized platforms. Hence the desire to explore the possibilities by proactively driving the development of the decentralized infrastructure standards.
Jack has stated that such standards will not only help solve current problems but will also bring new benefits to social media. Accordingly, they will help users to communicate across different social media platforms. They will also help make governance much easier for social media companies. For instance, the decentralized protocols can facilitate easier enforcement of rules against hate speech and misinformation among other abuses.
Jack also stated that by leverage blockchain technology other benefits such as “open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization” will accrue. The blockchain tools will also help foster healthy conversations, give the users greater control, accelerate innovation and promote health.
The news has been welcomed by the crypto community, twitter users, and the larger tech sector with mostly positive responses to Jack’s twitter announcement. Jack has been lauded as a visionary and the likely forerunner of radical shift in the expansive social media space. He has received much praise for being proactive and pursuing disruption rather than waiting to be disrupted.
Image by Andrew Mager from Flickr
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