Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced that his company was funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.
This according to him would help better control abusive and misleading information on its platform. Dorsey listed out the objectives of the division called Bluesky, via a tweet thread on Wednesday, which will be spearheaded by Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal.
The news about setting up Bluesky comes at a time when clamours for decentralised platforms have gathered stream. This catapulted in popularity of open-source platform called Mastodon, based on an open-source networking protocol called ActivityPub, which saw uptake of over 20,000 Indian users in a space of few days recently.
"There are many challenges to make this work that Twitter would feel right becoming a client of this standard.
"Which is why the work must be done transparently in the open, not owned by any single private corporation, furthering the open & decentralized principles of the internet," Dorsey said.
Governance has become a sticking issue for global brands like Google, Twitter and Facebook, who’re now being questioned for every wrong move or any incident that has taken place on their platforms.
Dorsey said the team would not only develop a decentralized standard for social media but also build open community around it, inclusive of companies and organisations, researchers and civil society leaders.
"This isn't going to happen overnight. It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed above.
The Mastodon comparisons are hard to deny and the platform, through its tweet, shared its opinion on the development.
(With IANS inputs)
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