Keep an eye on Twitter's Bluesky intiatiative

[nedjo]

https://twitter.com/jack/status/1204766078468911106:

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide.

Indications that approach will be blockchain-based:

new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there.

The outcome will have implications for ActivityPub, either (a) vastly changing it, on the off chance that some version of it is used, or (b) creating a competing set of standards with strong corporate backing and a very large initial user base--and, likely, a correspondingly high barrier to entry.