Week in Review - Twitter's decentralized future

Saturday, January 16, 2021 • By Lucas Matney

Hey everyone, welcome back to Week in Review. Last week was stressful, this week was a little bit more okay. Small victories.

The Big Story

As a very clear follow-up to the last couple weeks of Week in Review topics on Section 230, I spent the bulk of this week chatting with researchers in the decentralized web space largely asking about how they thought a future without 230 might look like. There are countless factions in this corner of the web with plenty of political ideologies represented, but there are a lot of good people trying to consider what the future of the internet can and should look like.

I’ll be sure to write that broader story at some point in the coming weeks, but in the course of reporting I got a chance to talk to a lot of the people involved with the early steps behind an ambitious decentralized web project that Twitter is trying to kick off. The project called “bluesky” was announced by CEO Jack Dorsey in late 2019 and since then it’s really just existed as a chat group involving some of the most notable figures and projects on the decentralized web. I got siphoned off on that story which I spent the bulk of Thursday and Friday working on.

A decentralized protocol for social media would essentially treat a social media post like an email and allow developers to create their own email readers that could view, search and interact with social media posts from a wide web of networks. It’s a distinct rethinking that would decentralize the responsibility to moderate content, something that would undoubtedly make Twitter’s life a lot easier, but might also make life easier for the Parlers or Gabs of the world.

I talked to quite a few researchers and operators in the space that are thinking up the new standard with Twitter, check out my deep-dive on bluesky if you’re curious, and have a great weekend!

Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

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