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The critical question is: does Elon believe in Twitter becoming a protocol?
Jack's thinking was clearly different and, perhaps, altruistic, like the early internet innovators. It contrasted sharply with the centrally controlled and often walled-garden platforms and ecosystems owned by Bay Area tech companies.
We are nearing the end of 2022. However, not much has come out of Bluesky. Before we analyse the reason for the lack of progress, let us understand the difference between a platform, an ecosystem and a protocol.
Platform: A specific combination of many standards to support higher-order work. For example, many underlying standards underlie an operating platform for a computer.
Ecosystem: A platform or several platforms working with a group of complementors and users towards a common purpose, e.g., the Android ecosystem or the Amazon marketplace. A single entity that owns and controls the ecosystems can disproportionately benefit from the ecosystem's success at the expense of other ecosystem participants both on the creator side (app developers or sellers) and on the consumer side (app users and buyers).
While the single entity has benefits, it also suffers the adverse consequences of centralised control. That includes regulatory backlash, political interference and the inability to scale critical functions such as content moderation. For example, in the case of Twitter, following the suspension of Donald Trump's account, Jack highlighted the Bluesky effort as one of the company's ongoing initiatives to ensure that social media moderation could be less decentralised in the future.
Protocol: An open ecosystem with decentralised governance. Additionally, the incentives of users (protocol participants) are proportionate to their efforts. A decentralised social media protocol would allow individual networks to govern themselves without one company or organisation exercising monolithic control over online conversations.
Social Media as Uncaged Bird
Jack hoped that in the future, Twitter would only control its app built on Bluesky, not other applications on the protocol. The open and independent system would allow applications to see, search and interact with content across the entire standard. He hoped the project could go far beyond what the existing Twitter API (application programming interface) offers. It would enable developers to create applications with different interfaces or methods of algorithmic curation, potentially paying entities across the protocol, like Twitter, for plug-and-play access to various moderation tools or identity networks.
Social platforms like Parler or Gab could rebuild their networks on Bluesky, benefiting from its stability and the network effects of an open protocol. Such a system would also provide a meaningful measure against censorship and protect the speech of marginalised groups across the world.
From Twitter's perspective, it offered several benefits:
Scalability: Centralised systems are struggling to meet challenges of scale, such as addressing misinformation and online abuse.
Value is shifting away from content to recommendation algorithms that direct users' attention. Therefore, there is a need to correct the focus.
Twitter hoped to fix the current business model, which disproportionately encourages user attention to content that sparks controversy and outrage to sell more advertisements. A decentralised protocol is more feasible now than ever because new technologies, such as blockchain, have emerged.
However, despite the potential benefits and management intent, Bluesky has yet to show significant progress. One apparent reason is management distraction. Jack's position at Twitter was shaky from mid-2020. He finally stepped down as CEO in November 2021. And then, the company was caught in an acrimonious fight with its current owner Elon Musk.
More importantly, there was no progress on Bluesky because Twitter is a company. As a listed company with external investors looking for predictable returns on their capital, and with the imperative to meet quarterly business goals, it is difficult to make serious headway on something so different and game-changing. Jack acknowledged in his tweet in August 2022 that the biggest regret he has is that Twitter became a company.
Killing 2 Birds With 1 Stone
However, with Elon Musk taking over as the sole owner of Twitter and taking the company private, it provides the best chance for Twitter to turn into a protocol. Elon does not seem motivated by the need to run Twitter as a commercial entity or to meet short-term business imperatives. He has the appetite to do something bold without worrying about its short-term impact. We saw that when he fired the content moderation team en masse and unsuspended accounts. He took the risk of alienating some of the biggest advertisers, which caused the company's revenues to plummet.
The critical question is: does Elon believe in Twitter becoming a protocol? Would he enable Twitter to truly become a place for free speech where the governance does not reside with Twitter but with the community? Or where 'free speech absolutism' is merely a cover to control the world's most influential digital town square? Well, we will have to wait and watch.
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