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Twitter Announces Decentralization of Social Media Platforms

By December 13, 2019May 5th, 2021No Comments

Twitter has announced revolutionary change that should come in effect in the following years. Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey spoke about decentralizing Twitter and introducing protocols, instead of further developing control over platforms. This change promotes the use of protocols and should impact all other social media platforms. Twitter announces decentralization of social media platforms and we are pondering on this topic.

Project “Bluesky”

Mr. Dorsey announced the funding of the project Bluesky. Project should be directed towards the funding of the decentralized version of Twitter. As Jack Dorsey has explained, promotion of healthy conversation is in its core:

…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.”

Dorsey’s concept relies heavily on “Techdirt“ Mike Mesnick’s view point regarding the internet in general: protocols, not platforms.

What Exactly the Protocols Can Change?

“Protocol” is a very serious, fancy word for a set of rules. The main objection to the existing way in which we exchange information on Twitter is that someone controls it. To put it simply, all social media platforms are in a possession of private companies. This means that those platforms have an entity controlling the flow of the information.

Twitter’s CEO believes that we could solve many issues that arise from such control if we move to a world where protocols dominate. Having a proprietary platform in the hands of corporations means that there is a police-resembling entity regulating the speech online.

Once protocols come in effect, users should be able to design their own preferences regarding filters, interfaces, various services, etc. Moreover, each user would be able to create the online environment in accordance with his or her needs. No censorship whatsoever. For example, if you find a certain speech offensive, you would be able to avoid such speech, and not silence that voice in its entirety. Furthermore, the platform will not do that for you. You will be able to make decisions on your own.

Basically, protocols are lines of code stored on blockchain. Anyone would be able to create their own set of rules, which would translate into code in the backend. In its essence, these would be a set of “if/when… then…” statements. This should make for the safe online environment. However, what someone considers “safe” is debatable. Therefore, there would be a choice for each user to create his or her own safe environment on social media platform. Once again, blockchain will be put into good use.

When Can We Expect to Be Able to Use It?

According to the Twitter officials, we will not see this change so soon. The plan is for decentralization to come into effect in years to come. At the moment, Twitter is recruiting the experts to work on this project.

In overall, decentralization of blockchain-based social platforms aims for better end-use control of their own data. Additionally, it should genuinely protect free speech and limit the online abusive behavior.

Do you think that social media platforms should be decentralized?

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