Jack Dorsey seeks to reduce governments' influence on social media

A group of developers, formed at the initiative of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey three years ago, has created a decentralized protocol that aims to limit corporate and government influence on social media.

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

— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019

After Dorsey left Twitter, his team broke a long silence to announce that the goal had finally been achieved. Yesterday, on October 18, the Bluesky initiative launched a website for its decentralized social media protocol, which they called The AT Protocol. The team also opened a waiting list for the Bluesky app, which was presented as the perfect «browser» to access the AT Protocol network. By the way, the waiting list quickly filled up.

Bluesky is building a social protocol. We released «ADX» (the X stood for Experiment) in May. Now that the design is starting to solidify, we’re renaming it to the «Authenticated Transport Protocol» — the «AT Protocol.» https://t.co/Q0XUF8OhVD

— bluesky (@bluesky) October 18, 2022

«Since May, we’ve been doing protocol work in a public repository on GitHub, but we’ve been mostly quiet on our blog and on Twitter. That’sstarting to change now,» the Bluesky team wrote in a blog post today.

The AT protocol, as a decentralized network, operates independently of the will of any single company. According to Bluesky, this independence will allow social media users to protect their personal data and avoid corporate algorithms that often want to keep users on the information hook. «Algorithms determine what we see and who we can reach,» the Bluesky team wrote today. «If we are going to trust our online environment, we must control the algorithms themselves.»

Facilitating interoperability, or interoperability, between different platforms through a single protocol is also key to Blueky’s mission. The team has already developed an interoperable framework called Lexicon that will facilitate communication between different applications and networks built on the AT protocol. «The world needs a diverse marketplace for Internet services to ensure healthy competition,» said the Blueky team. «Interaction should be as natural as possible for the Internet.»

Dorsey today congratulated the Bluesky team on their «fundamental» achievement. He stated that «the goal of the project was to have Twitter eventually become a project of The AT Protocol standard.»

In late September, personal correspondence between Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey regarding the billionaire’s purchase of Twitter was leaked. In the published correspondence, Jack Dorsey shared with Musk his vision of the ideal management structure of the social network. According to Dorsey, instead of continuing to subordinate Twitter to ordinary corporate ownership, a fund should be created to finance the platform. It is also necessary for the social network to be based on an open source protocol, the former Twitter CEO advised the Tesla CEO.