Twitter funding a team to develop an open standard for social media (twitter.com)

Article summary

Twitter is funding a team to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media, with the goal of eventually becoming a client of this standard. The team will consist of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers. Twitter's CEO cites the need for a decentralized approach to address challenges such as content moderation and recommendation algorithms. The project, called Bluesky, aims to create a standard that can be used by multiple companies and organizations.

Main themes

• decentralized social media
• open standards
• content moderation
• recommendation algorithms
• Twitter's role in developing open standards
• ActivityPub and existing decentralized standards
• BigTech and open standards
• moderation and censorship in decentralized models

What commenters say

• Twitter's history of restricting developer access and cracking down on third-party development makes it difficult to trust the company to develop an open standard.
• The use of ActivityPub, an existing decentralized standard, would be a better approach than creating a new standard from scratch.
• Decentralization may not be an effective solution to the problem of misinformation, as it can make moderation and censorship more difficult.
• A decentralized model can allow for easier moderation by enabling server admins to refuse to federate with servers that are run by or used by people they consider to be problematic.
• Some commenters are skeptical of Twitter's motivations, suggesting that the company may be trying to create a 'neutral' platform where it has no responsibility for moderation.
• Others argue that BigTech companies like Twitter should not be involved in developing open standards beyond providing funding, due to their history of exploiting and controlling open standards for their own benefit.
• The development of a decentralized standard for social media could potentially solve some of the challenges facing the industry, such as the need for more transparency and accountability in content moderation and recommendation algorithms.