I am asking this more from a technology perspective than a political one. If bitcoin has a way to “protect” itself from regulation, couldn’t there be a way to decentralize a Twitter-like platform?
If you’re not centralized, you’re not in control. If you’re not in control, then you have no way to control the money (advertising.)
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Twitter itself was supposedly exploring such an option but it already exists in the open web world.
It’s called Federation and it’s one of the great things about Mastodon/GNU Social/Pleroma, etc.
Anyone can run a server compatible with GNU Social (we do at https://twit.social). You can follow the local timeline at that server but you can also follow anyone on any of the other federated servers.
For example, you can create an account on Mastodon.social (@you@mastodon.social) but use it to follow me on TWiT.social (@leo@twit.social) and John C. Dvorak at NoAgendaSocial.com (@Johncdvorak@noagendasocial.com). This is a very elegant solution.
Because anyone can create a server (it’s so easy, many people have a server for just their account) there are sketchy servers out there. There’s even at least one Nazi server. But I, as a server admin, can cut off any servers I don’t want to federate with. So you can’t follow any Nazis on TWiT.social, but you can on (a few) other servers, or you can join their server directly.
I think this is the future of social, it avoids many of the problems of Twitter and Facebook but still gives us a global community. I’m a big fan!
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Thanks everyone. I am no fan of President Trump’s tweets but I am for freer speech. I don’t like how these companies have so much control over what can be said.
Leo summarized it perfectly. A great example is the community over at counter.social. I believe they’re using a very customized Mastodon instance. Fun bunch of folks led by a colorful grey-hat hacker, who is constantly developing interesting features for the site.
The internet only seems centralized if you limit yourself to the central players.
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Yeah, I think mastodon works fine, at the end of the day its us (the internet users) who need to be able to moderate. If you do not want to see toxic content you should be able to filter that out.
Of course that means that people who are interested in radical thinking can also use the tech to do whatever they want but this was always so, and there are states that encourage this behaviour anyway (see Parler routing their messages via Russia).
At least with Fediverse each person can moderate their experience, and if people do not have the technical knowledge to do it, there are trusted servers that people can join. I have joined twit.social and I hope as we move forward to use it even more.
Having said that I am interested in reputable reporting accounts in fediverse that are publishing news (something like Reuters etc). Twit is doing a good job with tech news, but are there any other good accounts for more generic news?