Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said today that the company will fund the development of an open-source and decentralized social network standard in an attempt to address the shortcomings of current platforms.

Dorsey, in a series of tweets, detailed that the project will be run by a small independent team operating under the name Bluesky. The group is set to launch with up to five members. They will include open-source software architects, engineers and designers whose work will “be done transparently in the open, not owned by any single private corporation,” Dorsey wrote.

Bluesky is launching with an ambitious mission statement. Twitter will entrust the group with developing a decentralized protocol for social media platforms based either on an existing technology or, if nothing fits the bill, build the components from scratch. 

“We’d expect this team not only to develop a decentralized standard for social media, but to also build open community around it, inclusive of companies & organizations, researchers, civil society leaders, all who are thinking deeply about the consequences, positive and negative,” Dorsey wrote.

The project, the CEO elaborated, seeks to fix pain points in the current, centralized social networks such as Twitter. One shortcoming Dorsey cited is the difficulty of tackling online abuse and removing misinformation. Another issue he pinpointed is that the attention of social media users is often “being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health.”

The vision is to have Twitter eventually become a user of the decentralized social network Bluesky will build. Using the platform as a technical foundation, Dorsey posited, will enable the social network to become more competitive by freeing up resources for tasks such as building better content recommendation algorithms. 

Dorsey didn’t go into as much detail about the technical aspects of the project. But a key piece of information Dorsey did share, that Bluesky may build the standard on an existing technology, raises a few possibilities.

One is that the project will use ActivityPub, a decentralized social networking protocol maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium which already powers a number of social services. Another possibility is that Bluesky might be built atop some sort of blockchain implementation. Dorsey mentioned blockchain technology in his tweets about the project today and so did Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief technology officer, who has been tasked with finding a team lead for Bluesky.

Twitter’s move builds on thinking by Mike Masnick, founder and CEO of Floor64 and editor of the Techdirt blog, on why protocols are a better approach than platforms for internet platforms that have been struggling for years with content moderation issues. In a post today, Masnick said Dorsey’s proposal, which he characterized as a “toe in the water” toward his protocol notion, is promising but still faces many challenges.

“I appreciate that Twitter is not shying away from the challenges and potential pitfalls to this approach, but going in with eyes wide open, suggesting that this is an experiment worth exploring,” Masnick wrote. “It won’t change the way the web works overnight. Indeed, it might never have that big of an impact. But it certainly has the potential to be one of the most significant directional shifts for the mainstream internet in decades.”

Here’s Dorsey’s full tweet thread:

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

— jack 🌍🌏🌎 (@jack) December 11, 2019

Image: Pixabay