Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, has launched a beta version of BlueSky, powered by his long-teased decentralized social media protocol, on the same day that Elon Musk completed his takeover of Dorsey’s old company.
While Dorsey failed to stop the erosion of free speech at Twitter, sources inside the company long maintained that he opposed some of the worst impulses of the Trust & Safety department, Twitter’s leading censorship squad.
A project that Dorsey has long talked about is a decentralized social media protocol that allows users to choose the algorithms that deliver them content, connect with users across platforms that use the protocol, and portable accounts that can be moved from platform to platform.
Dorsey’s team at BlueSky built the @ protocol, which powers the BleSky app which claims to accomplish the Twitter co-founder’s decentralized vision, and launched it on the same day.
Dorsey first announced the project in 2019, when he was still at the helm of Twitter. It was set up with the resources of Twitter behind it, and Dorsey said he wanted the platform to ultimately be a “client of this standard.”
If realized, this would allow Twitter users to choose their algorithms and move their accounts to other platforms on the At protocol, something that would undermine attempts to control content from the top down.
In a message addressed to Twitter’s advertisers, the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk outlined a vision that seemed to align with Dorsey’s.
Saying he wished the platform to be “warm and welcoming,” the new SpaceX and Tesla CEO said he wanted you to be able to “choose your desired experiences according to your preferences,” comparing it to adult content filters for TV and movies.
“You can choose, for example, to see movies or play video games ranging from all ages to mature.”
This model of user-controlled content moderation used to be the industry norm, with the block button being the filtering method of choice on social media, and features like Google’s “safe search” providing an option to make search results family-friendly.
All that began to change in the mid-2010s, when in response to pressure from the media and left-wing advocacy groups, social media platforms including Twitter began to shift to a top-down model of content moderation, with a single algorithm and a single experience imposed on all users.
With Musk’s takeover of Twitter and the launch of the At Protocol, the pendulum may be about to swing the other way.
Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News. He is the author of #DELETED: Big Tech’s Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.