Twitter’s decentralized social network project takes a baby step forward

I find it very hard to believe that Twitter has interest in creating a decentralized service that they can't control content on or have sole ownership of advertising revenue.

I think they're just trying to be the trendsetters so they can have the most control of it when decentralized social networks take off.

>I think they're just trying to be the trendsetters so they can have the most control of it when decentralized social networks take off.

Nope. Dorsey has stated he wants twitter to be a client of an open standard https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106

It is in Twitter's favor to hand moderation to community admins. The "trendsetters" already have millions of users on their decentralized platforms https://matrix.org/_matrix/media/r0/download/twitter.modular...

The likely scenario is they create a modified version of an existing protocol, and manage a large client instance of that protocol (e.g. mastodon.social). Users will be free to host their own twitter server, so to speak, and twitter will have no control over those instances.

Jack Dorsey is a big advocate for decentralization and bitcoin enthusiast. Maybe he thinks he has made is money and is more thinking of his legacy.

It doesn’t seem like such a far off idea to act in the interest of “one’s grandchildren,” so to speak. There is room to invest in areas that will create good messages from the grand children. I’ve contributed to open source since I was a pre-teen, and often imaged a “future me” stumbling on my repositories as I have many before me, and do my best to work to standards that have benefited myself. Bravo to anyone who can spare a little to plant.

It doesn’t seem like such a far off idea to act in the interest of “one’s grandchildren,” so to speak. There is room to invest in areas that will create good messages from the grand children. I’ve contributed to open source since I was a pre-teen, and often imaged a “future me” stumbling on my repositories as I have many before me, and do my best to work to standards that have benefited myself. Bravo to anyone who can spare a little to plant, moreso if they can assemble a group of people who are aligned and do so.

I wouldn't put too many high hopes that Twitter will do this correctly.

> "Twitter could also potentially do more good by contributing resources to existing projects"

They could also potentially do more harm to existing protocols by coercing those and then dropping out when it doesn't suits them.

Twitter, as a company, has a horrible track record in supporting the developer community. This seems like a good project on its face, but ultimately (IMO) serves as a distraction. While the paper released today is worth reading and the people on the team are sure to have good motivations, I wouldn't get my hopes up on this.