---- by https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/ ----

So it turns out Twitter's new open source effort for decentralized social media (@bluesky) is NOT what we were hoping, unfortunately.

Thread

First, it's a "change of backends" for Twitter, so by design the new decentralized backend would have to support all current Twitter needs, and specially business needs.

This rules out a lot of current protocols, I'll explain why...

Twitter is "big world" social networking. In other words, social media. It needs to allow the use case of an account being followed by millions, and these million followers getting push notifications nearly instantly.

"Big world social nets" connects the whole world together.

Big world has upsides and downsides. Upsides are reach and discovery. Downsides are a ton of abuse issues: spam (look, that's reach!), foreign interference in elections (reach too!), randos (reach!), etc. In other words, scale, Silicon Valley's favorite word.

"Small world" social networks focus on simple friend connections and small communities. Scuttlebutt (SSB) is a SW social net. Mastodon, to some extent, too, since intra-instance communication is far easier than cross-instance. If I'm not mistaken, Matrix is SW too.

Small world means that the application or protocol does not aim to provide the user a worldwide complete view of all other activity on the social network, so it's partitioned either by predefined communities (Mastodon) or the nearby social (sub)graph (Scuttlebutt).

Jack's thread was quite vague, but Parag's thread has more details. And guess what. They want blockchains! Well, not surprisingly, Jack was already bullish on that.

@paraga
I’m incredibly excited for Twitter to kick off @bluesky, a new independent effort to develop a decentralized standard for social media. Please see @jack’s thread for more context. I have the privilege of finding a lead for this team.

They also mention a need for data-intensive processing, which confirms the big world assumption.
Blockchains fit all those requirements: decentralization, open protocol, big world.

Replying to @paraga
The path ahead for @bluesky is full of uncertainty and challenges, which will be difficult but energizing for the right team. Some of the hurdles we can predict include:

@paraga
1 - A standard that enables consumer choice between many data-intensive algorithms, while protecting privacy, may struggle to compete on quality with centralized approaches.

They want the protocol to support business needs, because the big world assumption means big data, this rules out local-first protocols where data processing is local. So you end up with "miners" or whatever that need incentives to process your data.

@paraga
1 - A standard that enables consumer choice between many data-intensive algorithms, while protecting privacy, may struggle to compete on quality with centralized approaches.

2 - Viable and sustainable incentives and business models for the various entities participating around a decentralized standard need to enabled, in order to attain broad adoption.

So while I applaud their effort to do this open source (compare this to e.g. Facebook!) this seems a lot more like "continuing Twitter-as-is under decentralized backends", then it seems like "let's alter Twitter so that it's based on decentralization".

Move on folks

by @andrestaltz.
https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/
https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/1204847969649995776