Monday, December 4

What is Bluesky? The Twitter for Web3 social media standard


Bluesky it’s the decentralized Twitter that promises to put users back in control of their social media experiences. The Bluesky initiative was announced by Jack Dorsey, founder and former CEO of Twitter, in December 2019. Dorsey said then that his idea was to build a decentralized Twitter. Currently, it is the companies that determine through their algorithms what content is suitable for users. Bluesky’s objective is quite the opposite: that people decide what content they want to see when using a social network.

What is Bluesky, twitter

Dorsey wants to make Bluesky the standard for decentralization on which new social networks are based, aiming towards building a free and open internet. Currently, corporations like Google, Facebook or Twitter decide the type of content that users can see. Dorsey’s task is complex, because despite the fact that there is much talk about the decentralization of social networks through blockchain technology, no company has yet achieved it.

Back to decentralization

At the time that Dorsey advertisement the idea of ​​creating Bluesky, recognized that when Twitter was founded, many people saw the potential it had to become a standard for the decentralized internet. However, little by little, the management team of the social network, in which Dorsey is included, centralized the network more and more. Dorsey justifies that they made the right decision at the time, but that the changes that have taken place in recent years make a transformation of social networks necessary, to give power back to the user.

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In this sense, Dorsey gave 4 main reasons why such a transformation is necessary. First of all, because social networks now face completely new challenges, which centralized solutions cannot meet. For example, it is difficult for a centralized application to address abuse and misleading information, without imposing too much burden on people. Second, because the value of social media is shifting away from content creation and deletion and into the recommendation algorithms that direct attention. Algorithms in the hands of a few and that do not allow choosing or creating alternatives.

Useful content and Blockchain technology

Third, Dorsey points out that existing incentives in social media focus attention on content that generates controversy and outrage, rather than content that truly informs. And lastly, and most importantly, new technologies have appeared that allow us to solve these problems. In this case, blockchain technology offers a number of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance and even monetization.

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Bluesky’s goal is to create a social network that, in addition to solving all these problems, serves as a standard for other social networks. The Bluesky team’s intention is to build a new open source standard from scratch, which can be used to build decentralized applications.

Jay Graber, nominated by Bluesky developer Dorsey last August, underlines in a recent Article the importance of self-certification protocols built with blockchain technology, in the construction of Web3.

The importance of self-certification protocols

Graber defines Web3 as “a user-generated authority, enabled by self-certifying web protocols.” He argues that such protocols are a superset of technologies that include, but are not limited to, blockchains.

“Authority on the web establishes who has ultimate control over content. In the earliest stage of the web, there was generally no separation between “users” and web hosts: whoever hosted a website also placed the content there. In the shift known as “Web 2.0,” sites that gave users accounts to create content became popular, but the hosts of the site still had the final say and could unilaterally change anything they wanted. This is mostly how the web works now. In the evolution of the web that I call Web3, users can cryptographically assert their identity and post verifiable content, and sites that host content don’t have the authority to change it, because the root of trust is in the data itself, not where it belongs. it’s found”, Graber explains.

Without creating user account

The person in charge of Bluesky explains that in Web3 a model is emerging in which people do not have to host a server or create a user account in another person’s database to create content. “Servers can choose whether or not to host someone’s account or content, but they don’t have final authority over it. The technologies that enable this are self-certification protocols,” says Graber.

A self-certification protocol is one that allows content authorship to be tested directly through user keys and content addressing. ​​Self-certifying data allows trust to reside in the data itself, not where it resides, allowing applications to move away from client-server architectures.

Social networks on the Web3

In this sense, Graber highlighted the importance of returning power to the user and gives clues about what Bluesky could be. “Instead of focusing on terms, let’s try to focus our energy on what properties and features are important as the Internet evolves. I want a more user-centric web, where people can create their own authority to create content without being locked into a centralized service,” says Graber.

What seems clear is that Twitter wants to lead the future of the new generation of decentralized social networks. A few days after Graber published his article, Tess Rinearson, head of crypto at Twitter, reported in a tweet about a job offer for the crypto area of ​​the social network. It details that Twitter Crypto is a new team exploring decentralized technologies: blockchains, cryptocurrencies, and web3. “This is an opportunity to help bring crypto to a more general audience – we’re connecting web2 and web3!” the job posting reads.

Twitter wants to explore NFTs and DAOs

In the proposal, the company makes clear its interest in monetizing creators. Thus, he explains that the chosen person will have to explore the NFTs, the membership tokens or the DAOs. Likewise, the selected person must collaborate with the Bluesky team to shape the future of decentralized social networks.

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