It’s time for social media interoperability

A decentralized social networking protocol could change this dynamic by ensuring open access to the network. Companies can still make money by offering services, as Gmail does with email and Github does with Git. But decentralizing access ensures that they can’t be monopolistic and ignore users. It creates a market-based approach where the best ide... See more

The only way I know of to truly live up to these 3 principles is a free and open protocol for social media, that is not owned by a single company or group of companies, and is resilient to corporate and government influence. The problem today is that we have companies who own both the protocol and discovery of content. Which ultimate

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Every year, centralized social networks place more restrictions on what users and developers can do. They seem to believe that limiting choices is the path to a healthy network, while the opposite is probably true. A decentralized social network can challenge this hypothesis by making two powerful promises that centralized networks cannot. They can... See more

The key to making this work is that while there would be specific protocols for the various types of platforms we see today, there would then be many competing interface implementations of that protocol. The competition would come from those implementations. The lowered switching costs of moving from one implementation to another would create less ... See more

Moving to a world where protocols and not proprietary platforms dominate would solve many issues currently facing the internet today. 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 one... See more

Or consider Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s plan, announced in late 2019, “to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media” — one in which Twitter as we know it would be a mere client. Dorsey said that he saw potential in spreading out responsibility for moderation, recommendation and other processes that were becoming unwieldy under the c... See more