Twitter is funding a group to create an 'open and decentralised standard' for social media

Twitter Inc plans to set up an independent research group to create an "open and decentralised standard" for social media networks, a model which the microblogging platform aspires to follow, Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said on Wednesday.

Centralised solutions are struggling to meet many new challenges faced by social networks, including large scale content moderation, Dorsey said, adding that the new standard will not be owned by any single private corporation.

"Centralised 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," he tweeted.

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralised standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

Twitter Chief Technology Officer Parag Agrawal will be in charge of hiring a lead for the research team, called Bluesky, Dorsey said, while acknowledging that the project would take many years to complete.

Parag Agarwal has also emphasised on the challenges that they will see in this project, explaining three of them on Twitter. He tweeted, " First is, a standard that enables consumer choice between many data-intensive algorithms, while protecting privacy, may struggle to compete on quality with centralised approaches."

3 - The traditionally slow and deliberate consensus-building approach to evolving standards might fail to keep up with a rapidly changing ecosystem and set of consumer needs.

— Parag Agrawal (@paraga) December 11, 2019

Vijaya Gadde, Legal, Policy and Trust and Safety Lead at Twitter has also stepped in to tell people that the company believes that "in 2020, we will be using our voice to more prominently support and foster the values of a free and open internet."

2. Twitter has always believed in the principles of a democratic, open Internet — we believe the future of our industry rests in community-focused initiatives & direct engagement with emerging innovators. We look forward to continuing this public conversation next year.

— Vijaya Gadde (@vijaya) December 11, 2019

(Also read: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey calls Facebook’s experiment to hide ‘likes’ a ‘great step’)
Dorsey went on to explain how blockchain technology can provide a model for decentralising content hosting, oversight and even monetisation of social media.

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.

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

"It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation ... ," he said, detailing how the move would be beneficial for Twitter.

Why is this good for Twitter? It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past.

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

This isn’t going to happen overnight. It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed above. Our commitment is to fund this work to that point and beyond.

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

The research group Bluesky has also tweeted explaining how they are planning to work on this project:

As we mentioned, the team will have complete freedom to identify and consider all the great work already done, and if they believe it’s best to work on a pre-existing standard 100%, they will. If not, they’re free to create one from scratch. Their discretion, not Twitter, Inc’s.

— bluesky (@bluesky) December 12, 2019

Meanwhile, taking a dig at Twitter CEO, rival Mastodon tweeted saying "he knows we exist and he literally follows us."

Jack is many things, but an idiot he is not. He's whip smart. He knows we exist, he literally follows us.

This is not an announcement of reinventing the wheel. This is announcing the building of a protocol that Twitter gets to control, like Google controls Android. https://t.co/tcIi7WnU3V

— Mastodon (@MastodonProject) December 11, 2019

(Also read: US Senator Elizabeth Warren also wants to break up Apple alongside Google, Facebook, Amazon)
Firefox has offered its help to twitter, saying that they are extremely invested in the free and open internet and so they can help.

We have thousands of open source architects, engineers, and designers who have been contributing to decentralization & building community (like #indieweb) over the past 15 years.

It's safe to say we're extremely invested in the free and open internet, so we're here to help.

— Firefox (@firefox) December 11, 2019

People are also reacting to this news on Twitter. Several users have pointed out that Twitter is copying its rival Mastodon. Well, we all saw this one coming, didn't we?

pic.twitter.com/2KvEcLCy2U — (@allan05) December 11, 2019

How will this be different from something like Mastodon? — Mat Honan (@mat) December 11, 2019

On the other hand, some are really appreciating this new initiative by Twitter:

Disrupting the centralized social media model is the only way to stay relevant in the future of social media. Good thinking and investing @jack! — Gabor Gurbacs (@gaborgurbacs) December 11, 2019

pic.twitter.com/zVYQ0559sv — Dreadnstyn (@dreadnstyn) December 11, 2019

With inputs from Reuters

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