Twitter CEO, Jack Dorsey in a tweet trail has announced that the company is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers and designers. He said that this team will work on developing an open and decentralized standard for social media, with Twitter being one of the clients of this standard. The team is being called team bluesky and will be led by Twitter’s CTO, Parag Agarwal.
In the trail, Dorsey stated that in the early stages, Twitter was imagined to be a decentralised internet standard, however, they took a different path and increasingly centralised the platform. Due to which they are facing a number of issues like centralised enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information, social media shifting from content hosting and removal to recommendation algorithms, attention being focused on content that sparks controversy and outrage, and the emergence of new technologies that make a decentralised approach more viable.
Twitter wants team bluesky to either find an existing decentralised standard they can help move forward or to create one from scratch.
Dorsey states, that the formation of this team will help Twitter, by allowing them to “access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation.” Twitter will now focus its “efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation.”
The company has stated that the work done by team bluesky will be in the open and will not be owned by any single private corporation. They hope the team to develop a decentralised standard for social media and also build an open community around it.
Jack in his tweet trail did accept that it is going to take many years to develop a “sound, scalable, and usable decentralized standard for social media.” He also stated that Twitter will keep funding this team even after the standard has been developed.