
Twitter's new effort for decentralized social media is NOT what we were hoping? - karanganesan
https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/1204847952134656000
======
karanganesan
\---- by [https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/](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/)
[https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/1204847969649995776](https://twitter.com/andrestaltz/status/1204847969649995776)

