Twitter Is Funding Independent Effort To Develop an Open and Decentralized Standard For Social Media (twitter.com) 58
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.
Lo... (Score:2)
is it me you're looking for?
RSS Feeds? (Score:2, Informative)
Back in the old days of the early 2000's before social media was a thing that adults would use, We had RSS Feeds, which we would point our browser to a list of sites which they would give us their updates in near real time.
Granted I cannot Like a comment, or use the RSS Feed to reply to something. But it seems like a good start.
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Granted I cannot Like a comment, or use the RSS Feed to reply to something.
Given the current environment, I wouldn't see that as a negative anymore.
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I've not used social media to date...and even with a new 'standard'...I don't really see myself doing it in the future.
I still keep up with my friends just fine without it on a VERY regular basis.
Real friends that is...
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How ironic that right after thinking those words, you posted them to this social media site.
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Slashdot is more of a BLOG site then Social Media.
Other then the comments, the articles are mostly controlled by the Slashdot editors.
Slashdot has articles? (Score:3)
But seriously, how often do you read the article as opposed to the summary? We're here to talk to each other, with the topic of conversation being inspired by a few sentences about an article.
There are definitely better places for tech news; Slashdot is the place to talk to Jellomizer, Drunkpoo, etc.
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You used the words "Slashdot" and "Social" in the same sentence?
Don't you know those are mutually exclusive words and concepts??
Re:RSS Feeds? (Score:5, Interesting)
And back before we had RSS feeds, we had Usenet. And back before we had Usenet, we had Fidonet. and back before we had Fidonet, we had standalone BBSes.
My point is that nothing is really new or novel, and additionally, calling it, "social media," is about as Orwellian as it gets since it's so antisocial in the way people behave on various message boards. People don't talk with each other, they talk at each other.
I'm now of the opinion that large-scale operations are wrong. People need to self-select for the kinds of communities that they wish to participate in. The Internet provides the medium for connecting to those communities. We don't need something sitting as a man-in-the-middle between.
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" we had Fidonet"
I would say it is unacceptable for all users to press escape twice to login.
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I actually don't have a problem with a forum having some form of minimal requirements to join, like having at least entry-level proficiency in the forum's subject matter.
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We have already got all of the hardware that's required to converse with anyone. Why isn't a "social media platform" of some kind existing at the hardware level?
What I mean to say is that we have a piece of hardware that encompasses the idea of "a phone". Why don't we have a piece of hardware that encompasses the idea of "social media"? That means a device who's sole purpose is devoted to one operation, and that operation is "social media". Like a phone, it would be able to save contacts, and all sorts
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Other than being "watering holes", where sheer numbers get people to congregate, social media sites have brought nothing new to the picture: Messaging was done via IRC, SMS, and mail. Forums were newsgroups.
Maybe we should go back to that, except with some gatekeeping to mitigate spam, DoS, DDoS and other attacks:
1: A standard messaging platform for end to end messaging. Signal comes to mind.
2: A more dynamic messaging protocol for multi-user chats. IRC comes to mind, with dcc being upgraded to have end to
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I'm now of the opinion that large-scale operations are wrong. People need to self-select for the kinds of communities that they wish to participate in. The Internet provides the medium for connecting to those communities.
Congratulations, you just described RSS. I select who I subscribe to, not an algorithm. All I need is the internet to connect me to the feed. But if I want someone to curate a feed for me, they can just publish links to other sites and I subscribe to their blogroll. (Remember those?) Or if I want a list of lists, RSS supports that. Multiple feeds can be aggregated together into one feed.
Join that with Twitter for notification and the "system" already exists. Follow (on Twitter) whoever publishes the RSS fee
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
No (Score:2)
No. It's all about the customers. Right now, we have to post ads on FB/Gram, and Twitter separately. It's a PITA. He knows that he'd get more advertising money (our included) if we could post to FB/Grab and Twitter at the same time. We would never advertise on Gab because we don't want the business of screaming, gun-toting right wing lunatics.
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Re: Somebody wants to go back to Square (Score:1)
Re: Somebody wants to go back to Square (Score:1)
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Gab has gone hardcore on censorship, you don't want them involved in anything. The owner is on a crusade to destroy porn.
Since porn is allowed on Twitter I imagine he doesn't want anything to do with them either.
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Porn was officially banned:
https://twitter.com/getongab/s... [twitter.com]
Gab is demanding a "cultural revolution" against porn.
https://twitter.com/getongab/s... [twitter.com]
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Walled gardens -- or just plain walls (Score:2)
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You must be kidding. Most of this censorship happens in the first world countries. We just call it something else. And you think citizens aren't being surveilled on "first world" networks? Literally those are the most surveilled networks on the planet.
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Sure. Just Google "cancel culture" or "Russian hacking". If you want to talk about surveillance, just Google "google".
One ad platform (Score:3)
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WRONG.
The real translation is:
We need to get our hands into this decentralized social media shit so we can kill it, or at least maintain control over it.
Solution (Score:1)
People with extreme minority and toxic opinions have turned it into a textbook example of tragedy of the commons.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree. We should shut down avenues for minority opinions to exist. People really should just agree with the majority or shut up.
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I agree. We should shut down avenues for minority opinions to exist. People really should just agree with the majority or shut up.
Meh. Do you know what the tragedy of the commons is? It's when the worst folks take over a common area and wreck it. Best example is what the trolls did to most all of Usenet.
Many groups were taken over by some folks with severe psychosexual issues. They had rolling barfights that were similar to some of the most egregious stuff that used to be here on slashdot, only with real names.
In some of the groups I was in, there were world renowned technical experts. But as the noise to signal ratio went up, t
Already exists. (Score:3)
So many of these big companies seem to be populated with people who never studied anything or looked at anything outside of their own bubble. ITs sheer stupidity because anyone who does a simple search can find the already existing open standard social networking protocols. If they did they would know that open standard social networking alleady exists through XMPP, OStatus, ActivityPub, Diaspora, together with older protocols such as SMTP, IMAP, vCard, WebDAV, RSS, LDAP, AS2, and even NNTP can provide a complete suit of functionality. These protocols and built on can be combined together to form a complete solution. It is best to use extensible XML protocols such as XMPP which can be extended to add new functionality rather than to create completely new protocols just to add a small feature. With the latter, you end up with hundreds of completely incompatible protocols rather than a shared common denominator that XMPP can provide and then built on with extensions to add additional features. This is one reason I am not a big fan of JSON because XML already implemented a standard interchange format that worked well and supported namespaces for extension and allowing different XML based protocols to live in the same stream.
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Facebook Chat and Google Chat used to be built on XMPP, but they dropped it. Big Tech Companies aren't much interested in interoperability at this point.
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Yeah, key term in the quote is 'recommendation algorithms'. Twitter, Facebook, et al are advertising platforms first and foremost. It'll be interesting to see how this evolves into a platform where the owners/maintainers get access to even more personal data, habits, etc.
Mention of 'deep learning' in 5... 4... 3...
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I sat in a meeting with a group of developers a few years back, and our goal was to develop a system for sharing data between our three different sites. We spent the morning coming up with requirements for the sharing system/protocol. At lunch, as I was thinking about it, it seemed to me that the requirements we'd listed were exactly those that RSS was developed to address. In the afternoon, I suggested RSS, and despite some initial resistance, everyone finally agreed that RSS was the best solution, especia
perfect (Score:1)
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YOUR overlords. They are not my overlords.
Do not make the assumption that everyone is as foolish as you and grants lordship status to anyone who claims to have it.
Twitter, known for arbitrary censorship (Score:2)
This doesn't even make sense (Score:2)
Twitter's entire platform is about moderated, censored content.
Who the heck would create a decentralized platform... that also censors content? Does that even make sense? It's even in the announcement!
> For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and __misleading information__
"We can route around censorship... but also censor!"
What's next, a private e-mail protocol that lets anyone view your e-mails?
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Google did that with Wave (Score:3)
I'm "I had a Google Wave account" years old.
Wave was awesome. It should have been directly integrated into and replaced Gmail. But the Gmail guys wanted it dead so Google killed development. Luckily, they open sourced it so Twitter can pick it right back up where Google left off.
Mastodon (Score:2)
This already exists (Score:3, Interesting)
Wolves in Sheeps Clothing (Score:2)
If they try to market themselves as some kind of standard, they will try to amass a Town Hall level of control over what is allowed to be said, even if it sounds like no one will be moderating it.
10 years ago with laconi.ca (Score:1)
The gargantuan Twitter Team (Score:1)
"A team of up to five people."
Wow, well that's certain to eclipse Bolt, Beranek, and Newman -- who only designed TCP and IP.
It's for sure going to be better than IBM - who only designed Watson AI.
Perhaps they shouldn't put so many resources into it. After all, they're only looking for a lead person. Maybe they should just ask the cleaning guy to stay late and design a replacement to decentralize all social media. With up to five more people just in case he scratches his head or anything. /s
E
Bring back USENET (Score:2)
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