Good News: Twitter Announces An Excellent Lead For The Bluesky Decentralized Social Media Protocol Project

Innovation

from the this-is-good dept

It has been nearly two years since Jack Dorsey announced plans to explore switching Twitter from its current setup as a centralized platform controlled by one company to a distributed protocol project that anyone can build on — called Bluesky. This was especially exciting to me, since some of Jack’s thoughts were inspired by my “Protocols, not Platforms” paper. There hasn’t been that much news on Bluesky since then — leading many to insist that the project was going nowhere. However, there have been plenty of things happening behind the scenes — at least somewhat complicated by the whole pandemic thing. In January of this year, an “Ecosystem Review” document was published.

At the time, I saw some people mocking it as a pointless whitepaper, rather than anything concrete, but to me it was actually a really important step. When Dorsey first announced Bluesky, many people complained that he was trying to reinvent the wheel, when there were a lot of already ongoing projects trying to create distributed and decentralized protocols for social media. Understanding the actual ecosystem, what works, what is limited, what can still be done, and how to build something that will be (1) effective, (2) compelling, and (3) will last, takes some actual thought and consideration.

Since then, Twitter went through a process of interviewing a number of possible leads for the project — and, as a disclaimer, I will note that Twitter invited me to take part in interviewing each of their finalists, and submitting my feedback and thoughts on them. The candidates all had strong ideas and attributes for leading the project, but to me, one stood out way beyond the others: Jay Graber, who has now been named to lead the project. For what it’s worth, Jay was the author of that original ecosystem paper.

This is an exciting announcement, as I felt that Jay’s vision for the project was not just the most complete and thorough of anyone else’s, but also the most compelling. Seeing her vision got me more excited about the possibility to actually move forward to a world of protocols over platforms than I had been in a while. There are, of course, many, many challenges to making this a reality. And there remains a high likelihood of failure. But one of the key opportunities for making a protocol future a reality — short of some sort of major catastrophe — is for a large enough player in the space to embrace the concept and bring millions of users with them. Twitter can do that. And Jay is exactly the right person to both present the vision and to lead the team to make it a reality.

I know that Bluesky is now actively looking to expand the team and hire a few developers. If you have the skills necessary, please check it out. This really is an amazing opportunity to shape the future and move us towards a more open web, rather than one controlled by a few dominant companies.

Filed Under: competition, decentralized, distributed, jay graber, platforms, protocols, social media, web3
Companies: bluesky, twitter