#blueskying A New Social Media Standard

January 14, 2021 7:16 AM

In a recent Twitter thread, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the startup of funding to develop a decentralized blockchain based social media protocol, dubbed "#bluesky". The move seems to be made in response to concerns over Twitter moderation policies following Twitter's recent decision to ban Donald Trump from the social media platform.

In the thread Dorsey discusses the rationale for the move, citing Bitcoin as a model for a decentralized internet.

posted by NoxAeternum (10 comments total)

This is yet another sign that Dorsey really needs to resign. I find it telling that his reaction to increased scrutiny of the moderation and operational decisions of his company is to try to find a way to nope out while not actually doing so. Beyond that, this is illustrative of a larger trend in tech of a general unwillingness to face the responsibility for what tools and platforms people create. The cherry on top of this particular sundae is the citing of Bitcoin - a system built on a lack of trust, causing massive ecological damage from its power footprint, and host to many scams - as the future of the internet, which is an idea that should terrify people.

If you don't want to face up to the power and responsibility of running Twitter, Jack - the door's right there. It's time you used it.
posted by NoxAeternum at 7:26 AM on January 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

A decentralized Internet? You mean like the internet before companies like Twitter showed up?
posted by Sand at 7:27 AM on January 14, 2021 [8 favorites]

We had decentralised approaches to this coming out of our ears — usenet, forums, blogs, irc, email, etc, etc. There are non-technical reasons that all such things seem to tend toward or be replaced by centralised alternatives: ease of use, the need for moderation, the network effect, discovery, size of the available audience or attention, pace of feature development and more.

Even Jack's example of email is increasingly centralised – Gmail for consumers, 365 for business - and the chance of getting your messages from your hobby box past their spam filters is getting lower and lower.

In short: five tech bros bashing out a spec isn't the place to start. This is much more about sociology, politics, psychology and economics than it is about JSON.
posted by bonaldi at 7:28 AM on January 14, 2021 [4 favorites]

So…Mastodon?
posted by adamrice at 7:30 AM on January 14, 2021 [3 favorites]

More importantly, it's not at all clear how making it more difficult to moderate problematic content or users helps with his stated problems of abuse and misinformation. It also diverts attention away from their refusal to even attempt to do so. German laws made them take down fascist users and posts. They did so – but only in Germany.

They have had abilities to address these problems for a long time. It wasn't lack of a protocol that stopped them trying.
posted by bonaldi at 7:30 AM on January 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

shittorrent
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:31 AM on January 14, 2021 [2 favorites]

I must admit that this type of thing is the only implementation of a blockchain that I think adds real life value rather than sucking it away: blockchain as distributed-ledger content store, rather than distributed-ledger value store.

Every "currency" value-store implementation is inherently deflationary, and should be stomped out of existence with extreme prejudice.
posted by tclark at 7:33 AM on January 14, 2021

This is from 2019 FYI
posted by lohmannn at 7:35 AM on January 14, 2021 [5 favorites]

Lol blockheads
posted by rodlymight at 7:39 AM on January 14, 2021

This is from 2019 FYI

Quoted for visibility. This has nothing to do with the Trump ban.

I've long thought that a decentralized alternative could solve many of the problems with walled-garden social media networks.

However, I'm not sure that it can solve the biggest and most urgent problem, which is disinformation and radicalization.

I suspect that it might make the problem worse, since people could (and would) set up their own parallel Twitters, each reinforcing their own ideology and their own alternate version of reality. (I mean, that problem is already so bad on the centralized networks that the US is on the verge of...not-good things.)
posted by escape from the potato planet at 7:43 AM on January 14, 2021