Twitter is funding a group called Bluesky, tasked with developing an open-source decentralised internet standard that the social platform would eventually adopt itself, according to a tweet by CEO Jack Dorsey himself. The group will consist of a team of five people such as information architects, engineers and designers, and twitter wants ideal candidates to have experience working on blockchain.
However, the standard will require years to build a sound, scalable and usable decentralised standard for social media. Twitter would become an open protocol similar to what an email operates on, meaning Twitter would provide the infrastructure that enables the creation of multiple unique, interoperable, Twitter-like platforms.
Dorsey’s concept of an open, decentralised social media is a leapfrog solution to current plagued content moderation. Content moderation has become an urgent and difficult problem for social media platforms.
By proposing this solution, Dorsey has effectively agreed that content moderation is too huge a burden for a sole platform to tackle and social media platforms should band together in order to keep speech free and users safe. In theory, the Bluesky initiative should relieve Twitter from being solely responsible for managing what people post as communication would be spread throughout different platforms.
Lifting that burden would allow Twitter to focus on creating better content recommendation algorithms to promote healthy conversation – an approach which Twitter declared over a year ago. Potentially a more holistic way for Twitter to achieve its goal of “help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation.”
