Twitter Wants Social Media to Be More Like Email

Right now Twitter is controlled and maintained by one company. But imagine it opening up to encompass dozens, if not hundreds, of independent providers all running the social media service together.

Twitter is now exploring this very idea. On Wednesday, CEO Jack Dorsey said he's funding a small independent team charged with developing an "open and decentralized standard for social media."

"The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard," he said in a tweet thread.

The announcement is somewhat stunning; in a sense, Dorsey is proposing killing off the old Twitter for a new open standard. However, the company is indicating that the current model of one company exclusively controlling Twitter may not be sustainable over the long-term.

"First, we're facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet," Dorsey says, pointing to the problem of content moderation. Right now, Twitter and other social media services such as Facebook and YouTube have to rely on human staffers and AI algorithms to help them take down illegal content, abusive posts, and suspected misinformation. However, Dorsey says the solutions are "unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people."

Dorsey then points to how social media services are using recommendation algorithms to serve up content to keep users hooked. "Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can't choose or build alternatives. Yet," he says. The same algorithms have also received criticism for promoting conspiracy theories and clickbait articles at the expense of misleading the public.

"Existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health," Dorsey added.

Social Media That Functions Like an Email Client

The benefits of a decentralized model go beyond content moderation. For instance, want an edit button? Or the ability to craft tweets longer than 280 characters? An open standard promises to pave the way for greater customization of Twitter and how it runs.

In his thread, Dorsey also points to an article from Techdirt editor Mike Masnick on the need to invest in "protocols, not platforms" to solve the problems facing social media. Masnick writes: "Rather than relying on a few giant platforms to police speech online, there could be widespread competition, in which anyone could design their own interfaces, filters, and additional services, allowing whichever ones work best to succeed, without having to resort to outright censorship for certain voices."

The concept is comparable to today's market for email services; users can pick from a variety of different providers, each of which has their own perks and unique interfaces to send messages. Now Twitter wants to take the same approach and apply it to social media.

"Why is this good for Twitter? It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past," Dorsey added.

Uh Wait, What About Mastodon?

Of course, creating the open standard is easier said than done. Twitter's CEO expects the effort will take "many years to develop" into an actual protocol that's scalable and easy to adopt. For now, the company's CTO, Parag Agrawal, will be leading the effort under the name @bluesky. The initial goal is to hire up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to help the company develop the project.

That said, Twitter isn't the first to create a decentralized social media network. The company's plan sounds a lot like Mastodon, which has been gaining popularity in recent years as an alternative to Twitter.

Recommended by Our Editors

Twitter Pauses Purge to Preserve Accounts of Deceased Users

Twitter Quitter? Here's How to Get Started on Mastodon

Twitter Mulls Reining In Retweets, @Mentions to Stop Abuse

Unlike other monolithic social media services, Mastodon operates via a federation of volunteer-operated servers. These servers can connect to each other thanks to the open source protocol ActivityPub.

Mastodon itself chimed in on Dorsey's announcement, and warned that Twitter's decentralization proposal may not be as open as it seems. "This is not an announcement of reinventing the wheel. This is announcing the building of a protocol that Twitter gets to control, like Google controls Android," Mastodon tweeted.

However, Twitter is indicating it may skip developing its own open-source protocol and instead settle on an existing technology. "Team will have charge to choose whatever is best, be that what exists today or start from scratch," Dorsey said in response to whether it might adopt ActivityPub.

Twitter disables tweeting via SMS after CEO Jack Dorsey is hacked