Bluesky the project that Twitter will finance for the development of a decentralized standard for social networks

twitter bluesky

When we talk about the term "social networks" Brands such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, among others, immediately come to mind. But The issue of decentralization is hardly associated with the term And it is that social networks as we know them today face several problems because they are centralized.

Although there are solutions decentralized the famous "dapps", these are little known and therefore its use depends a lot on its popularity, such is the case of Mastodon which is a free and decentralized microblogging social network that is similar to Twitter, in which, being frank, how many of our readers use it daily? Few actually.

Dapps are available and fix many of the shortcomings of the centralized networks, of which we can mention one of them which is that they face the difficulty of combating online abuse, eliminating disinformation or moderating content on a large scale.

It is because of that to solve all these problems, Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter Inc., ad last Wednesday that your company will create and fund a research team independent whose objective will be to create an open source and decentralized standard for social networks.

The project is called Bluesky and no one is working on it yet. Twitter's technical director, Parag Agrawal, is responsible of finding a project manager who will form a team of up to 5 people.

The members who will be in charge of the Bluesky project must be architects, engineers and designers of open source software. Dorsey said his work will be done in a transparent manner and will not be owned by any private company.

The vision is that Twitter will eventually become a user of the social network. decentralized that Bluesky will build. According to Dorsey, using the platform as a technical foundation will allow the social network to become more competitive by freeing up resources for tasks such as creating better content recommendation algorithms.

Dorsey also clarified that the Twitter funded team will not work alone:

"We hope that this team will not only develop a decentralized standard for social media, but also build an open community around it includes companies, organizations, researchers, civil society leaders and all those who think deeply about consequences, positive and negative" .

bluesky

Bluesky launches with an ambitious mission statement. Twitter will entrust the group with the development of a decentralized protocol for social media platformss based on existing technology or, if nothing fits the bill, it will build the components right from the start.

Dorsey also explained how technology blockchain can provide a model to decentralize content hosting, monitoring, and even social media monetization.

Dorsey did not go into so much detail about the technical aspects of the project. But a key piece of information Dorsey shared - that Bluesky can build the standard on existing technology - raises some possibilities.

Since there are decentralized social networks and the best known system is probably Mastodon, which is based on an open source network protocol called ActivityPub.

With that it is possible that the project will use ActivityPub, a decentralized social media protocol maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium that already powers a number of social services.

Another chance is that bluesky can be built on some kind of blockchain implementation. Dorsey mentioned blockchain technology in his tweets about the project today and so did Parag Agrawal, chief technology officer at Twitter, who was tasked with finding a team leader for Bluesky.

It's an ambitious project, and even if it's worth it, it may take a long time before we can see the effects.

At the moment, the company ensures moderation, who decides for herself what content can and cannot appear on the social network, all based on the rules she has agreed to. Therefore, Bluesky's work could allow users to create alternative recommendation tools and algorithms adapted to Twitter.


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  1.   Abd hessuk said

    Alternative social networks: Diaspora, mastodon, Pleroma, Peertube, Pixelfed, etc.
    If twitter gets into this mess, it may lose many users to decentralization.