Jack Dorsey, the man behind Twitter recently announced that he is planning to fund a new research team to develop a new vision for social media. He terms it as an “open and decentralized standard for social media” in order to complement some of the rising concerns encircling problems with Twitter. 

The idea is to create a social media network that works on emails instead of likes and comments. 

People will still be able to join different networks and communicate no matter which one they’re using. Only this time, they will be doing it using emails. The algorithms working at the backend of these platforms will also minimize the tendency of the platform to lead individuals to the most outrageous content first. It will allow them to stay engaged in conversations and topics which they are looking for. 

It will also benefit social media networks as it will enforce restrictions against hate speech and other abuses. Individuals will then have complete freedom of expression and stay safe from prying eyes. 

The Plan is Already in Effect

Different social media platforms are already operating on the decentralized framework. For example, Mastodon is an open-source social media network that is profoundly used as an alternative to Twitter. 

It is a federated social network that pretty much works like Twitter. However, with Mastodon, the user has complete control of data. They decide on what their Live Feed may look like and how it works. 

As users are already discussing Twitter’s big reveal, some are claiming it as Mastodon with Blockchain. It isn’t just Twitter, Tim Berners-Lee, the man behind the World Wide Web has also claimed that he is working on several projects backed by the decentralized network based on blockchain.  

However, Twitter has an upper hand in the project than the rest of these platforms because Twitter has a devoted user base of more than 300 million individuals. With that, Dorsey has a more solid chance of pushing the new standards of social media among individuals and create a better impact. 

As much as Twitter seems eager to make a shift to a decentralized environment, the same sentiments are not held by Facebook who has the lion’s share of the audience approximating at 2 billion users. 

The BlueSky Project: An Idealistic Vision for the Future of Social Media

Jack Dorsey has put together a team of five individuals who complements his vision and is taking a step forward to deploy his innovation. The vision and the team run by BluSky represents in a string of tweets. 

Bluesky’s idea is to create a centralized infrastructure for social networking. Their goal is to create Twitter as a client of the network in the coming years. At one of the occasions, Dorsey revealed, 

“For social media, we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward or failing that, create one from scratch, That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide.”

The new technical standard will allow Twitter to focus on its efforts to build open recommendation algorithms which will more likely control the kind of information being shared on the platform. 

The recommendation algorithm is more likely going to allow users to avoid content moderation problems. The idea is to restrain the hate speech and create a much healthy environment for people. 

However, when it comes to content surfacing, Twitter will handle which content is to be made popular on the platform. It will follow the same ranking patterns, the one more akin to Google Searches. 

Even though hosting and managing content isn’t benefitting Jack Dorsey, he is still inclined at changing the way content is surfacing the Internet these days. His agenda is to build a better society. 

“They’re looking to deal less with the responsibility that is the walled garden, aka the platform,” 

says Jennifer Grygiel, social media professor, Syracuse University. 

As far as where the BlueSky project stands in the present market, a spokesperson at Twitter said: 

“We’ve long demonstrated our commitment to doing critical work in the open and empowering people to build off of the fundamentals of our service. Apart from the technical elements outlined by Jack today, this is about exploring the fullest and most participatory vision of our service.”

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