Jack Dorsey pushes for decentralized Twitter alternative

With the internal investigation led by Elon Musk identifying censorship-related issues on Twitter, the social platform’s former CEO Jack Dorsey has promoted the idea of a “free and open protocol” for social media. 

In a post, Dorsey highlighted some potential solutions to the current problems of the Twitter platform. According to the former Twitter CEO, this includes making it resilient from corporate or government control, giving the right to remove content solely to the original author and implementing moderation through algorithmic choice. He explained that:

“I’m a strong believer that any content produced by someone for the internet should be permanent until the original author chooses to delete it. It should be always available and addressable. Content takedowns and suspensions should not be possible.”

Dorsey believes that the Twitter platform under his leadership and the current Twitter do not meet the three principles that he mentioned and blamed himself for not fighting for the platform. He wrote:

“This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. […] I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.”

Dorsey also noted that the biggest mistake was focusing on building tools to manage the public conversation instead of creating ones that let Twitter users manage it for themselves. “This burdened the company with too much power,” he added. With this, the company was also exposed to outside pressure, according to the former CEO.

In a tweet, Dorsey also shared the GitHub link to a censorship-resistant open protocol that is currently being built. The project dubbed “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted” aims to enable the creation of decentralized social networks based on cryptographic keys and signatures.

Related: Twitter closes offices, staff resign while users eye decentralized options

On Oct. 18, Dorsey also announced new developments regarding Bluesky Social, a decentralized social media project that was started in 2019. With the platform, there will be no company that can decide what becomes published. Rather, there will be a marketplace of companies deciding what to “carry to their audiences.”