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Twitter Is Funding Independent Effort To Develop an Open and Decentralized Standard For Social Media (twitter.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
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.
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Twitter Is Funding Independent Effort To Develop an Open and Decentralized Standard For Social Media More

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

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  • is it me you're looking for?

  • RSS Feeds? (Score:2, Informative)

    by jellomizer ( 103300 )

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Sebby ( 238625 )

      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.

      • Indeed.

        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...

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward
          I've not used social media to date

          How ironic that right after thinking those words, you posted them to this social media site.

          • Slashdot is more of a BLOG site then Social Media.

            Other then the comments, the articles are mostly controlled by the Slashdot editors.

            • 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.

          • How ironic that right after thinking those words, you posted them to this social media site.

            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)

      by TWX ( 665546 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @12:23PM (#59508396)

      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.

      • " we had Fidonet"
        I would say it is unacceptable for all users to press escape twice to login.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by TWX ( 665546 )

          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.

          • 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

      • 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

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by imidan ( 559239 )
      I read Slashdot via RSS and am able to both mod and reply to comments through my RSS reader. It's still a great system when sites support it.

  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @12:23PM (#59508394)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Seems like more and more countries are censoring the living hell out of the Internet, if not walling themselves off from the rest of it, or shutting it down completely, and using it in whatever form they allow as a surveillance tool on their own citizens, so any so-called 'social media standards' (which sounds like a ridiculous idea to me anyway) will only really apply to essentially first-world countries, or at least countries that are trying to have a democratic, by-the-people-for-the-people, non-shitty g

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 )

      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.

  • One ad platform (Score:3)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @12:25PM (#59508408)
    I agree it would be easier to have a single ad platform. It's good that Instagram and Facebook are integrated (mostly). But it would be convenient to have one place to buy all of our ads for all of the platforms. Not only would it be more convenient, but we could target even better if we had all of people's overlapping data from the different social media "apps".
  • There is nothing wrong with Twitter that can't be fixed by eliminating Twitter.

    People with extreme minority and toxic opinions have turned it into a textbook example of tragedy of the commons.

    • Re:Solution (Score:4, Insightful)

      by 110010001000 ( 697113 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @12:57PM (#59508528) Homepage Journal

      I agree. We should shut down avenues for minority opinions to exist. People really should just agree with the majority or shut up.

      • 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)

    by Eravnrekaree ( 467752 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @12:43PM (#59508480)

    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.

    • 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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mattyj ( 18900 )

        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...

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by imidan ( 559239 )

      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

  • Now our overlords can block, censor, and deplatform across multiple services. Yaaaay

    • 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.

  • is funding building a social platform? No thanks.

  • 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?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rldp ( 6381096 )
      These are common corporate games. When Twitter is accused of censorship they can point to this do-nothing committee and say "look we are committed to open ness!"

  • Google did that with Wave (Score:3)

    by Dallas May ( 4891515 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @02:11PM (#59508850)

    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.

  • Its decentralized garbage. If you thought Twitter trolls were bad, the decentralized nature means these guys get away with everything. They get to run their own server with their own rules that allows them to harass everyone and all you can do is block indviduals who will change names and start again.

  • This already exists (Score:3, Interesting)

    by adrian_vanburen ( 6426086 ) on Wednesday December 11, 2019 @02:37PM (#59508960)
    It's called Fediverse. The most popular server software is called mastodon, with several app options on mobile to tweet on it. I switched to mastodon a few months ago and am very happy with it. People take it more seriously and post quality content. Whenever twitter is ready, they can simply peer to the fediverse network and expand their reach to thousands more people overnight.
  • Twitter has already shown that they will censor any account that doesn't adhere to their philosophy and beliefs, including whatever has become the latest "offensive" thing to The Narrative.

    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.
  • If you can imagine an open source project that was a mix of self-hosted Twitter and P2P torrenting, that's Laconica. Still one of my favorite projects, and could easily be updated for 2019/2020.

  • "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

  • The NNTP (USENET) protocol was the shit. All you need is to revamp it a little bit, with MIME, it shouldn’t be too hard, and all you need is a revamped client.

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