Twitter wants to develop an open, decentralized, federated social media standard...and then join it

[tekna2007]

For the people denigrating Twitter as a social phenomenon, I mostly agree, but Climate Twitter is a real and useful thing, serving public debate, science news and climate communication. I don’t know why it happened that way, but it did, maybe because Twitter sucks slightly less than Facebook.

[anon62122146]

@RickMycroft

“Add a backdoor to the system.”
“Okay, but it’s open source. Everyone will smell that dead canary in an instant.”

Who do you ask to add a backdoor to an open source project? The company that might have started it doesn’t own it, it’s open source. The community isn’t going to volunteer to do it.

If you want a feature added to an open source project, you have to pay someone to implement it yourself, and, if the community doesn’t like the feature, you have to fork it.

Even if you make a backdoored fork of an open source social media platform, and make some company say it’s official, who’s going to use NarcBook when they can just use the community version instead?

This only applies to countries with some level of free speech protection, of course, but even for others, not having a one stop shop to go to makes enforcing censorship a lot harder.

[gracchus]

@alahmnat

Even if the landscape remains fixed and absolutely zero additional people leave Twitter after a hypothetical occasion where they implement ActivityPub, the average number of Twitter users any given person follows, times the number of people on a given Mastodon instance who would import their Twitter follows, would probably not create that much higher of a traffic load

As you note, a lot of members of individual instances will likely follow the same people and instances in the Fediverse. What will be interesting is balancing out the discovery aspect that Twitter’s broadcast approach does well: how to find interesting or relevant new accounts to follow.

@alahmnat

if the goal is to perfectly replicate Twitter’s current UX and feature set when it comes to things like full-text search, indexing, and algorithmic “who to follow” recommendations, then yeah, every instance wold need a copy of every post

I’m going on the assumption that a goal of not replicating Twitter in terms of scale and its lowest-common-denominator broadcast model would be the healthier option for a federated and decentralised social media platform built on ActivityPub (or whatever Jack has planned here).

We must always bear in mind that Dorsey’s project is not primarily about building a better social media platform, but rather about trying to impose his engagement-based “metastasis-at-all costs” advertising business model onto such a platform before he’s ordered to moderate Twitter.

ETA: a related Wired article suggesting @Bluesky should consider Mastadon/ActivityPub.

Jack Dorsey Wants to Help You Create Your Own Twitter

[RickMycroft]

@anon62122146

Who do you ask to add a backdoor to an open source project?

I know, right?

The only downside would be explaining all that to the guy with a wrench, sent by the same people who think the solution to multiple crypto-backdoors without destroying security is to “nerd harder”.

[GulliverFoyle]

@gracchus

But hey, go to town, Twitter.

Certainly. I’m all for tech companies turning over a new leaf.
(he said as he locked up the good silver)

[RickMycroft]

I wouldn’t be surprised if Jack puts a fish hook in this, like an API key that you have to register for in order to play with Twitter, which can be cancelled at any time, for any reason.

Open, Embrace, (and once the pressure is off) Strangle.

[tigerberry]

@bobtato

If you create a new microblogging app using Node on a single $5/month instance, no, of course it won’t handle Twitter’s volume. But it can probably handle the couple of hundred users you might actually have to begin with. And if you can get revenue from them, you can turn it into something that will handle thousands of users, and so ad infinitum.

And yet - there’s no viable alternative to Twitter so far. You’re missing the key thing here, user involvement. You can set up the most awesome alternative service and it will either die or vegetate with a small, stagnating user base (that is likely to eventually gravitate toward specific ahem, subcultures), if you can’t convince Twitter’s audience to use your service instead. And we’ve seen time and time again that you pretty much can’t convince a user base that huge to just leave an ecosystem and start again from zero on a new one (which is I suppose one of the reasons why Twitter wants to be involved, so that the user migration could be as seamless as possible).

Things like that tend to happen fairly spontaneously. If you want to give it a push, then I think the only way you could get larger numbers of people to move from Twitter to elsewhere is if they follow influencers, celebrities, etc… (but then, see how Tidal, spearheaded by celebrities/artists, failed to become particularly relevant) Also you need to convince the services that allow signing up/in with a Twitter account to allow your service as well, you need to shop around with brands, etc. to push your service to their users, and so on.

[Clifton]

Everybody I know who’s using Mastodon is using a server run by some group of their friends. There are lots of these.