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.
Dorsey says he was inspired partly by a proposal from Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has long promoted a standard of “protocols, not platforms” for the internet. He also says that a decentralized system could solve some key problems with social media — especially moderation issues.
Decentralized social networks already exist. The best-known system is likely Mastodon, which is composed of individual- or community-run servers loosely connected through a system called the “fediverse.” Mastodon itself is based on an open-source networking protocol called ActivityPub.
Maybe Twitter is anticipating the breakup of Facebook? It is odd for a very large centralised walled garden social network to go in this direction. One hopes the focus would be on an open protocol and not another closed one. But if open, we already have Mastodon and ActivityPub. This will be interesting to follow.
#technology #socialmedia
#^Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform
CEO Jack Dorsey says Twitter could adopt the system