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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32053 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, now conspicuous 2.4% stake owner in Elon Musk's Twitter just unveiled a new social media venture: BlueSky Social and the AT Protocol.

This is on paper what he's been telegraphing for a while as a decentralized base for social media that puts control of accounts and algorithmic curation back in the hands of the user using similar tech as pioneers like GNUSocial and Mastodon. But now with large enough potential backing to break the network effects that robbed us of an opportunity for interoperability in this space so far.

It's hard not to see this convenient turn of events as something of a plan. There was for a long time some rumor that Dorsey was something of a hostage during his tenure as CEO, an old school tech libertarian who helmed the notoriously censorious and partisan centralized platform (which was so in part on direct orders from the State as we now know) despite seemingly contradictory personal views.

This could just be opportunism and seizing the moment to promote what is now his pet project, but given what Elon Musk has insinuated about his vision for Twitter and the hypothetical X "everything app", and their common affection for web3 and decentralization, maybe this was more than just happenstance.

So what do you guys think, is this yet another decentralized social media flash in the pan, which will be forgotten like the countless others that also had some names backing them up (including Tim Berners Lee at one point) or is this actually part of a dastardly scheme that might form the base of the new twitter that will rise from the current turmoil?

Dorsey has too much political valence now to helm a major company and attract enough of the right and non-woke left. Without those groups, you might as well tune in to The View.

Fair enough, but that doesn't preclude him from building infrastructure that can then be used by his more charismatic friends.

....like principle of embrace, extend, extinguish?

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