Welcome, everyone. Welcome to "Goodbye Facebook, Hello Decentralized Social Media."
We'll get started in just a few minutes. My name is Wendy Hanamura. I'll be your host today. I'm the Director of Partnerships from an organization called the Internet Archive, one of the world's
largest digital libraries. We're so glad you're with us and we have a very timely topic to talk
about: decentralized social media. I think it's actually time for me to turn this over to Davis,
who is with METRO, our true host today, the Metropolitan New York library council.
Thank you so much, Wendy, and good afternoon, everyone. My name is Davis Erin Anderson. I am Director of Programs and Partnerships at Metropolitan New York Library Council.
We go by METRO for short, and you can find us on twitter at @mnylc, which is our initialism.
I'm really grateful to our co-presenters at Library Futures, Internet Archive, and DWeb
for working together on this this series. It's a six part series; we are on session four, so if
you haven't come across us before and you'd like to stay tuned and see what else we have in store,
please do come along for the rest of this wonderful journey. We'll be meeting through the end of June, so as we go, we are looking forward to a robust conversation with you
all. So if you would like to share your comments, send your questions in chat that would be lovely.
We also have the Q+A feature if you'd like to use that instead. That's your call, but feel free to speak liberally there, we are all ears. We do have a Code of Conduct, however,
so we do require civility in our chat today. You know what that looks like: be kind to each other,
be kind to our speakers and our presenters ,and we'll all get along just fine. We are working on a resource guide that you will receive in your inbox in the coming days, so stay tuned for that. We do
have a link where you can see the current version. My colleague Mary is dropping that into chat, so
check that out. We have this is our fourth guide. We're building a library for you to refer back to,
so if you want to know about the decentralized web and the various aspects thereof, we have lots of reading for you to do. so I will drop a link later on to the webpage where all the series information
is held. It's my pleasure to introduce you to Wendy Hanamura. Wendy is really the brain power behind this whole series and we're so grateful to her for sharing all of her wisdom with us
and connecting us to really great speakers, and I'm looking forward to today's speakers as well, so thank you, speakers, for being here. Wendy is Director of Partnerships at Internet Archive,
and she's helping to produce the six-part series Imagining a Better Online World: Exploring the Decentralized Web. So thank you so much, Wendy, and over to you. Everyone. welcome.
***
Welcome to the fourth session in this METRO series called "Goodbye Facebook Hello Decentralized
Social Media." You know, after this week maybe we should be calling this "Goodbye Twitter."
I wanted to share the game plan with you briefly. I thought we'd mix it up this time. You know,
there is such a buzz about the big news of the week that Twitter is going to be purchased by
Elon Musk I thought I'd like to bring all of our speakers who are such experts in this field
to talk a little bit about the Twitter takeover and then we'll go back to our plan, and Jay Graber
who is the CEO of Blue Sky is going to give you a very bird's-eye view of this this sector of
decentralized social media, its potential, and its problems, and where we are today. And then I've asked two founders of two different decentralized social medias that you can use today
to demonstrate them. You're going to be seeing a demonstration of Element which is, think Slack but
decentralized, and also Manyverse. Think Facebook but decentralized. Let's get out of slides and
let's just bring everyone. I'd love to introduce you to our speakers. We have Matt Hodgson,
who co-founded the Matrix protocol and Element. We have André Staltz, the creator of Manyverse,
which he calls social media without the bad stuff, and also Jay Graber, CEO of Blue Sky,
the company funded by Twitter, but not owned by Twitter. So welcome André, Jay, and
Matt.
This is quite an intense week for all of you I know, but perhaps no one more than
than Jay. Jay, what what has this week been like for you?
Pretty crazy. I think a lot of
people are asking me questions like I have a, you know, inside info on what Elon's thoughts are and
I really don't know, you know. He doesn't DM me.
So, well, about four months ago, you were funded
by Twitter to create some new avenues in the decentralized web, and this is a moment I'd love
to share this slide that I always think about. The Chinese say that a moment of crisis is really
two things: it is danger meets opportunity. Crisis equals danger plus opportunity. So my question
to the three of you is this: in this moment when Twitter has been taken over by the richest man in
the world, what do you see are the dangers and the opportunities of what's happening? André, let's
start with you.
Something like this happens once in awhile, crisis of this type, and it usually
means that people start installing Manyverse and different alternatives such as Briar, Matrix,
Mastodon, and so forth. So for us it's clear opportunity. People are excited about
what we provide as an alternative. The opportunity side there is clear. I think the danger,
if I could summarize, is that there's this transition period where, let's say, you know, let's assume that Elon changes Twitter significantly to disappoint a lot of people. And
those people will look for an alternative and if they don't feel satisfied with the alternative,
if the alternative is not ready like if Manyverse is not ready, then they feel stuck. Like, I
want to leave that, but I can't join this yet, so that's kind of like, it becomes a problem,
that they don't have anywhere to go, since their platform is being changed. So I think it's most
likely to be just an opportunity. I don't believe things will significantly change under Elon, maybe
a little bit, but that's to be seen.
So let's see. Matthew, how about. You come from the UK with a
little bit of a different perspective on this.
Yeah I think it's a really interesting time to
see how things evolve, and there is definitely a pretty optimistic interpretation, and also a
really pessimistic kind of dystopia, which could come out to this and it's interesting that Elon's stated reasons for purchasing Twitter is to change the moderation system to allow for
completely unfettered free speech, which could be interesting, if it's combined with a reputation in
the moderation system that allows people to block the stuff that they don't want to see.
Charitably,
one might hope that there is a situation where very perversely the world's richest man goes
and uses his powers for good by going and counter-intuitively purchasing this outfit
unilaterally and then almost making it a commons, going and making it available to everybody
and empowering people to block the content that they don't want to see, or alternatively it could
go the other way around and he then owns all of the data in the metadata which is sitting on the platform and he doesn't put the moderation that's in place and the entire thing sort of melts down
in a terrible sort of hellscape of everybody being obnoxious to one another without the sufficient
controls to empower people to filter out the stuff they don't want to see. So it's certainly
got potential to be an experiment. I'm cautiously optimistic on it, but it will be strange if you
had to do this very autocratic action in order to potentially completely democratize the underlying
conversations well there's much to dig into your utopian vision. But I want to go first to Jay and
see how you would answer that question.
Yeah I think everyone who works on decentralized tech
in this realm always knows that something like this can happen because the crucial thing about
centralized system is, I say, they're high variance, which means they can move very quickly in any direction, which is for good or for bad. And so that could mean one person can just take
it over and that one person could be Elon Musk, it could be Rupert Murdoch, it could be George Soros,
and depending on how you see the world ,these could all be better or worse outcomes. And so I think that, just at a high level, this turn of events really demonstrates that
social networks can, that are centralized, can change very quickly and then those changes can potentially disrupt or drastically alter people's identity, relationships, and the content that
they put on there over the years. And so I think this highlights the necessity for a transition to a protocol-based ecosystem, because over the long run, the kind of system that's resilient to
abrupt change, which could be good but also could be bad ,and you want to avoid the catastrophic worst cases, is one where you have a open protocol for core components like a person's identity
or social graph. And these things are user controlled and resilient to disruptive change, and then you get other properties of the system which I think when Elon describes parts of movie
once about Twitter, it's similar to what we want out of decentralized systems in terms of wanting, you know, more user control and things like that. Of course there's other things that diverge.
He has probably his own ideas about, you know, how moderation should work and things like this,
but I think that creating a like a system in which we have neutral infrastructure under the hood and then build opinionated systems on top is a way where we can maybe
achieve the best of all these worlds.
That's actually a really good point, if i can just
say something, because I was going to bring a very similar point that the the the fact that
these platforms can change is a feature and it's a feature that they wanted from the beginning
back in the days 2004 or whatever when social networks, they were still discovering it, you know, the like button didn't exist at that point. It was good that they could,
like, pivot quickly, figure out what people like. The retweet button didn't exist at that point, so
change was a good thing back then when they were discovering social networks I think at this point we're kind of like, okay, we know what this is. We kind of get the hang of it.
And it would be good if it would not change, sort of like, email, you know, at some point, people
build infrastructure and all their business and things on top of email. You don't want email to like completely change over overnight. So I think what decentralization gives -- and email is
a protocol -- is the immutability. So the fact that, okay, this is how things work and it's
very hard to change it, actually it's a very slow process that requires a lot of people to agree,
okay, yes, let's go to that direction. So I think it's going to be a feature of social networks,
that they are based on protocols that they don't change, and also the acquirability,
if I could just add an another thing, the fact that the social network can be acquired
is a feature also. When they started it, you know, they want the company to
have a exit possibility. And that's what we're seeing here,
that brings up a tweet that you did
maybe two weeks ago. This was before Elon Musk took over, although there were hints that it was
coming. And you wrote, André, "no billionaire could buy Secure Scuttlebutt -- SSB -- even if
they wanted to because there's no single entity to buy. They would have to buy or blackmail every single user and this gets harder and harder as the network grows."
Can you explain that to someone who is unfamiliar with SSB? Why couldn't I buy it?
SSB is a
protocol. Another thing that would be a protocol is email. Another thing that would be a protocol is the English language, which is spoken not just in America but, you know, around the world,
in India, et cetera. So no one can say I will buy the English language now, because
you have to ask all the English speakers, can you please stop talking English now? It's a similar
situation that it's just rules that people use to talk to each other. Email is that, and Scuttlebutt
is also that. It's a bunch of rules that computers use to talk to each other.
Could I buy Manyverse?
Basically, no. I mean, you could buy me -- like you could like somehow purchase
my skills -- and make me stop developing the app, but the app will still be there. It's an APK file that people can still download, and the file in itself, I mean,
they can still communicate with each other, and the network still exists. Probably the development would not go forwards, at 10,000 people, it's not too big. So maybe you could like
talk to 10,000 people and pay them. But when it grows it gets harder.
But the point of, if
I understand it right, Scuttlebutt and Manyverse and many peer-to-peer protocols is that there is no one central hub, no one central server. Where I could block it to censor it or buy it or
even tamper with it all of the data is sent peer-to-peer. So those 10,000 people
hold their own data, send their own data. Is that correct?
Yeah this precisely.
Yeah.
I wanted to say just one thing about what André said, which is making social protocols immutable.
I think we have to think about all the things that are currently bundled into social networks, and it's actually many things. It's identity and it's data and it's, you know, hosting your data,
and it's getting a feed and actually some of these pieces should be more of a protocol, like identity, which may be one of those things that should like be more, you know, stable. But
then other things like, you know, buttons for features and apps on top of it , should and can change even in a protocol-based ecosystem, like you can build different apps over the same data
so there is -- it's not like the whole ecosystem is just frozen in time now, and that's something that you don't want when you do protocol design. It's just that the things that shouldn't change
because they're slow moving and people rely on them for you know, integrity of experience over years, like, you know how what their username is. Like that should be more the same and
then other stuff can change on top.
Thank you. Well, I want to get back to our original plan,
so I think I'm going to say goodbye to André and Matthew for just a second. Let's talk a little
bit about the state of social media. If you are on social media right now, you're blocked
in Russia. If you're on Twitter or Facebook, the platform still owns all of your data. They follow
where you go, they can monetize where you go. It's a little bit of a brawl, like being in a bar.
A lot can be said, lies can be spread. And if I want to take my marbles and play elsewhere,
it's actually pretty hard to go elsewhere to take my followers or my content. So decentralized
social media is structured to change that balance of power. And remember the stack that I keep going
back to in these sessions. Well, decentralized social media, we believe, is kind of in the
middle of the stack that you can decentralize.
Every layer of the web stack from storage to content addressing to applications and identity. And that's kind of the sector that decentralized
social media protocols falls under. Jay Graber is a long time friend and associate. I think I first
met you, Jay, in 2015 when you were battling for net neutrality as as an activist and an organizer.
But Jay is now the CEO of Blue Sky, which is quite confusing because it was funded by Twitter but it
is not owned by Twitter. It's actually a public benefit corporation owned by the team that runs
it themselves, and Jay can explain that more. But when it was first articulated by Jack Dorsey in,
of course, a tweet, he said that he wanted a team to develop and drive large-scale adoption
of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation. So it's in many ways an R+D lab.
And I've asked Jay to come and give you a high level view of where they are, where the field is,
and why it's important. So turning it over to you, Jay. Thank you for being here.
Thanks. I mean
one thing I just wanted to say, just framing what I'm going to present here, I also have in the past done these talks with Wendy where I give an overview of the decentralization space and
talk about, like, how we see all the various pieces in play. And so I kind of prepared a presentation at that level as opposed to being more specific about Blue Sky because I wanted to
frame the kind of work that Matthew and André is doing in the broad arc of what is decentralized
social, what even is decentralization, why should we care how are we going to get there, when is it
going to happen. So that's my presentation, but just to give you guys a brief intro about Blue Sky, which is now the org I'm running. So we're a public benefit LLC, actually, and
we are, as Wendy said, in R+D mode right now.
Before we even started this company, I
was just engaging in a matrix chat room with some people who Twitter had pulled together to discuss
the concept of Blue Sky, since they announced it in 2019. And so the gap between 2019 and 2022
was just us discussing ideas. And in that time period I said we should do an ecosystem review of everything that's out there, so I went out, and this is something I wanted to do anyways, but I
asked Twitter to, you know, support me to do this, and I, you know, interviewed André and Matrix,
I interviewed a lot of people in the space, and then wrote this overview, which you can find, maybe we can share the link afterwards, which I think gives a good deep dive into a lot of the
projects in the space. And so that's kind of how we started and right now we're looking at what's
the current state of the art now because things are constantly in motion. And what could we do to help accelerate for mainstream adoption. And so in our mission statement, with several things, one
is public conversation, and so that doesn't mean we don't think privacy is important. It's just we're focusing on public style conversations like what happens on Twitter where all these, you know,
threads are flying around of people responding to each other kind of all in the public domain. And then another is like large scale and so that really means thinking about scalability and how
do you get the same kinds of features so the stuff that, you know, the mainstream has come to expect,
which, you know, it sounds counterintuitive but something as deceptively simple as like a consistent number of likes on a tweet across the network. Like how do
you get that in a decentralized social network?
It's actually a somewhat complicated question. Or something like when you search a term, do you see all the tweets in the world referencing that term?
Well, somebody has to go find all those tweets. And if it's decentralized, those could be living many different places, so these are some of the questions we're looking into. And with that kind
of a brief aside on the work we're doing, there'll be more on that published soon. I'm going to just
go ahead and dive into the slides I prepared to frame the space in general and just talk about
decentralization at a higher level and then diving into social media.
So this is my 2020 snapshot
overview of decentralized social, but backing up even one step further, because I was told this
was perhaps a non-technical audience, just going into the concept of decentralization in general.
So decentralization: what is it, why do we think it's important, particularly for social media,
how do we want to achieve it in social media, and when is this going to happen? These are the
kinds of questions I'm going to explore here. So what is decentralization? This is a classic
picture from early internet, and it shows an example of a centralized network, a
decentralized or distributed network. And these network structures are actually kind of analogous
to, you know, the two kinds of networks are going to be presenting Matrix is the something that looks a bit federated like the one in the middle. And you know the peer-to-peer
architecture of SSB and Manyverse kind of looks more like the one on the far right where all these nodes are just communicating directly in this gossipy way. So that's the kind of overview
of just a general shape of what different kinds of decentralization could look like. But it's really not just these three forms: the centralization is a whole spectrum, and so on one end, you have
centralized services or current platforms where one company runs a database
or, you know, multiple databases, but it's all run by one company and that stores all the
information in the social network: the posts, the users, the relationships, anything that happens,
and on the other far end, we have something that's fully decentralized, and that could be something
like SSB, where as Wendy earlier described, it's peer-to-peer, every single device and person
in the network is sort of its own node of the network, communicating directly with other nodes. And this could potentially go even further if you relayed this over a mesh network. So even the
physical infrastructure could be here. It appears if you say send SSB posts through bluetooth from
phone to phone, and then a lot of stuff is really in the middle. And so in the middle
we have some architectures we call federated and matrix, which is going to present, is
a federated architecture where you have multiple servers that are people's home servers and these all communicate. And then anyone can run a home server, so it's an open system
and it's not controlled by one company or one database, one person controlling a database.
It's
many databases communicating, but there still might be this concept of a server and the database
So just in general, why would we want a centralized versus a decentralized system? These have different properties and I don't think there's anything actually inherently good or bad
about centralization or decentralization; they work in different circumstances for different use cases. And so some of those kind of general system properties of systems that are centralized are
unified because they are all one thing, they're part of one system, oftentimes hierarchical, controlled by one person, and they are homogeneous because they have this structure. They can all
align around one thing, and this means that they're concentrated. They can concentrate resources in one place, they can concentrate energy and direction, and that means they can
be very decisive, they can just decide to move one direction, like one day we were doing this, the next day nope we're doing that, and then the whole system, no matter how big it is, can all
just move. And so that's a centralized system.
And of course remember: this is a spectrum,
a lot of things fall somewhere in between, but you know an ultimately centralized system would just all be acting as one unit like all the atoms in your body
are centralized into your body and it's moving as one unit when your brain tells it to move and the opposite of this is decentralized. And so you know this can be, instead of unified,
it's spread out. It's diverse, there's a lot of different parts rather than all of the parts being
one system, even if they're all held together in some way. And instead of being concentrated,
resources can be diffuse. They are spread in different ways throughout the network, may be completely evenly distributed, or maybe there's a few concentrations.
But there's like a different
distribution: it's not all in one place. And instead of making one decision where they all
go one direction, the centralized systems tend to explore many different directions at once, because all the parts are autonomous. It's, instead of a human, it's like an octopus, like each arm has
its own thoughts, and it's kind of moving in its own direction, doing its own things, exploring and sensing and making decisions, even on its own. And so why would we want that for social networks?
Because society as a whole is facing a lot of crises, and I think we have the ability to,
as a whole, as a collective intelligence, investigate a lot of directions at once, but we don't actually have the free ability to fully do this in our current social architecture
because we have the web, which is a decentralized network like websites themselves communicate
through decentralized protocol and that allows the loud innovation in many directions at once. So, like all the websites that you visit these are all, you know, an example of an innovation
of one person or one group making an independent decision: just put something up there on the web and that's the decentralized protocol that enabled that. But now social networks are getting a bit
ossified, and it's hard to experiment in many directions at once. It's hard to like, add the features you want to your social network. Or if you have a cool idea for a way to view your
feed differently, you can't just throw it in there, because the company controls everything from your identity to your social graph to your hosting of your data to the way you see your feed
to even the color of the buttons on your screen. And so you just can't go in and change that and so if you decentralize you get the ability to innovate and explore many more directions at once
and this means ideas like interfaces, all sorts of things, and all the parts and in the system,
parts could be people parts, can be company's parts, can be technical. You know, architectures,
all the parts get more freedom and autonomy, and power gets distributed throughout the network. So now you have, maybe still, centers of power. We don't necessarily end up in a network that's
totally flat, but now you have different centers of power, and there's checks and balances, because
maybe people have the freedom to move between them. And having all this different distribution
allows more realities to coexist, so you can have a world that looks one way over here in one part
of the network, and it looks different in this other part of the network. And I think a key
thing about thinking about how to decentralize social is what needs to be decentralized, and I think infrastructure is what needs to be kept neutral. And we have to think about the
difference between what is infrastructure and what is, you know, stuff that can be opinionated and should change fast. And like I was saying earlier you know, André pointed out, some stuff should
kind of freeze now. Like I think we should take some things that have emerged as features, like our identity maybe, shouldn't really be features. Maybe that should become a core web protocol
and things like the colors of buttons should be, you know, opinionated and we should be able to experiment with those and those shouldn't be you know codified at a core protocol level.
So how do you decentralize things? The platform looks roughly like this: you have all these
things bundled together, you have the app that you use, and that app, you know, you have a username and that it's your identity, and that username and profile is tied to other people, and those
are your relationships, and the stuff you post is your data and it's handling all the networking you don't even think about it. That's like the integrated social app that we have now that's
centralized. And the way to think about splitting it up into protocols is, you know, you have probably a lot of differences in the apps and on top of the apps or in the apps the kinds of,
you know, algorithms and feeds and, like, different interfaces you can see. But then
maybe some things will be consistent and split up into their own layers, like identity. It will be,
you know, a protocol component: data, how you post your data, like, who hosts it, where it's hosted how it's moved around that gets, you know, put into a protocol component,
and then networking: how you communicate, maybe that's another protocol component.
So just to give an overview of the space I made this graphic a while back to show some of the
historical and current federated protocols and applications in the social space. And so I've
broken up the stack in this way where we have user-facing applications, and you'll see that in federated networks, user-facing applications are generally where the split is between the app
and the rest of the protocol, which is one thing. And then you have Matrix right here, for example,
and it's, you know, similar conceptually like XMPP and earlier predecessor, also different
in some key ways, but also similar conceptually, like activity pub, where, you know, Mastodon is. So this is just a brief overview of different, you know, kinds of federated protocols and
how they break up the app and these other layers so peer-to-peer protocols. They're
actually quite diverse compared to federated protocols because you potentially make different
protocol decisions around these identity data networking layers. These become their own protocol components. You might actually have to think about networking rather than just, like,
leaving that to something that happens on the web you don't think too much about. And the user-facing applications, I put Manyverse in here, because that was around at the time,
that's in the SSB ecosystem and Manyverse is an application built on top of this protocol, SSB, that has these different components, subcomponents of the protocol that define
what your user identity is, how your data moves, how it gets around.
And then one thing I want to touch on is blockchains, because the things that we're presenting here for decentralized social networks today aren't blockchain-based social networks, but
I think recently there's also been this cultural trend of blockchains taking off, and I think this is also a very important one for driving decentralization, but it means that people start
to understand decentralization as exclusively referring to blockchains, and that is not the case at all, and in fact blockchains are logically centralized. They provide an ability to this in
a way that is politically and architecturally decentralized, to emulate a centralized database
that everyone agrees on, and so they're very expensive way to do that, and generally you probably only want to use them, in my opinion, for things that you need that kind of agreement on,
like, money, we can't both say that we both own the same bitcoin. That would make it unusable as a currency. And we might not want to both say that we own the same name, maybe, that is another
place where we need to split things off. But in general, blockchains are, you know, not the only
kind of thing that you have as decentralization and they're not even fully decentralized in,
you know, the peer-to-peer sense because they have this idea of logical centralization.
Now that's not good or bad, it's just used for different things, so I wanted to touch on that,
and then when are we going to decentralize?
So I think, actually, decentralization and centralization comes in cycles for technical architectures, maybe even for societies,
and you have this period of bundling and centralization where, to get to be decisive, to be
unified, to get efficiencies of scale, to discover business models, data collecting, advertising that
benefited from this, you get into this, like, centralization feedback loop, but then when
some of the pressures and contradictions created by that centralization feedback loop start to
tear the system apart, you get decentralization. And I think there's both proactive and reactive,
like, involuntary decentralization and trying to build protocols to get people to use protocols as a way of proactive voluntary decentralization saying, you know, we think that this is the way
that things should move, and there's a lot of momentum for this. But there's actually, when people just leave and use a different site on the internet ,or they leave a site entirely, or they
go off to private communities and stuff like that, that's the form of involuntary decentralization,
which there isn't a protocol, a common sort of thread holding these people together but they've
just all gone through different directions because the tensions of the current platform, the ways that they can't serve all their users, ways that they can't set a single policy that works for a
billion people that just, like, starts to tear the thing apart. And so I think we're in this spiral of bundling and decentralization, and people doing the work in this space are thinking about how to
proactively decentralize things so that we can essentially create a new language that
allows people to, you know, live in a society together where many different realities can co-exist. Otherwise everyone just kind of goes off in their own world and
becomes unintelligible to each other. So that's my very high level introduction.
Thank you, Jay. Jay did a great job of talking conceptually about why we want decentralized
protocols and how they kind of work, but I want to show you two people who've built them, and you can
use them yourselves. So first I'd like to bring on Matthew Hodgson. He's the technical co-founder
of two organizations: matrix.org and the app layer on top of it element.io. Now Element: think,
as I said, Slack but decentralized. And I've had the pleasure of knowing and working with
Matthew since 2016 and now, you know, to see Matrix serving 55 million people, Matthew, is
phenomenal, so please show this group how it works and how they can use it.
Well, thank you,
Wendy, and thanks for the opportunity to explain what we're doing with Matrix. Before I jump into
the presentation -- the demo, I'll just show the architecture of matrix very quickly so that people
know what we're talking about, although Jay has slightly stolen my thunder. As Wendy says,
55 million users on this network of about 85,000 servers, people like Mozilla, the United Nations,
the entirety of the French state are using this as a way to run their own Slack or Whatsapp-style
capability, but they run it themselves in their own countries on their own infrastructure, securely communicating together, and the network looks like this. You have servers run by different
parties, and this is the federated approach that Jay was referring to earlier. The green dots are clients, like element for instance, our flagship client, which runs off it, and then you
have bridges, which connect you through to other systems. So we see Matrix as a glue between things
like Slack or Teams or Whatsapp. You can use Matrix natively, but you can also punch through
to these centralized silos and finally the way to think of Matrix is as a specification
with lots of different servers which can talk to one another and then also lots and lots of
different clients some written by us, some written by the community, even things like Mozilla Thunderbird which speaks it now as a way to provide real-time communication. And it looks
like this. So this is my personal matrix account.
I apologize that there's lots of red blinking
lights here, and it's a bit scary because I'm something of a power user. I've got five and a half thousand unread messages here and these span over six thousand different chat rooms. I mean the
scale is very, very big. And this particular room I'm showing here, it's called This Week Matrix
and it's got however many hundreds, 600 people in this particular room, and if I look at them here
I am on the right hand side, and I am @matthew on matrix.org. So I'm using a server called
matrix.org, but this room is replicated across many, many different other servers like this chat,
rich vdh, is on the server called sw1v.org. N ow the real novelty of matrix is that a chat
room like this with people going and comparing what happened this week in the matrix community
is the conversation itself is replicated equally over all the participating servers. And if I
put on my techie hat and go into under the hood quickly I can view the servers in the room and I
get a list of all the different servers which are participating here and the number of users on each
server and as you can see it's several hundred servers, now quite a lot of them are on the kind of original matrix.org server but then everybody else is coming in, there's the element.io server
there's, I don't know, probably if we looked in this we would find Mozilla and possibly people
on the Internet Archive, who knows, would be flying around on it and I can't actually talk
to somebody on a different server without equally sharing ownership of the conversation with them
so we call this subversive decentralization I literally can't talk to somebody else without like
bilaterally or multilaterally sharing ownership, so there cannot be an Elon Musk or a Zuck or a
Jack Dorsey in this model the fact that, if one of these servers goes down, it can be reconstituted,
synchronizing it in from the others, and there is just no owner. Now you can have different permissions for the users within the room, so here I am as an admin and then this guy is
there as a moderator for instance, but the actual integrity of the room is replicated everywhere.
We also have some nice features like spaces here, which allow you to go and narrow down the set of
rooms you're looking at. So I could go to say the Element corporate rooms here and I get taken into
one of the rooms a technology test room with an element corporate and I might know narrow it down
to say rooms about cryptography at which point i've actually narrowed it down from 6,000 rooms
to about six or seven different conversations flying around here so this is how you navigate
this massive network of different conversations, some public and some private. Another thing I
could show you here is if I go into a room, like an element demo room, we have the ability
to embed applications into these chat rooms so here we have an Ethereum ticker although there
isn't any cryptocurrency link with Matrix it's just an example of an app you could put there, or you could embed in a video conference like this one using the Jitsi video conferencing system show
you a conference within a conference like so and as a result everybody in this room will
end up seeing the same view of the same content basically allowing you to build a dashboard on it.
Now matrix is fun because it's a very, very generic protocol here Element as an
application originally called Riot is going and providing a Slack or Teams star user interface.
But for instance if I go to a web browser here is a totally different app called Cerulean that is a
clone of Twitter built on top of Matrix. Now it's a very simple proof of concept and we built it out
to demonstrate to the Blue Sky project how you could build something like a Twitter system on top
of the Matrix protocol and so you can see we have threads here and I've gone and posted some images.
We have things like the ability to subscribe to different reputation feeds and if I want to,
you know, hide particular content I could go and dial down the volume on some of these
messages and they will get blurred out and so it has the concept of relative reputation
so empowering the users to decide whether they want to see NSFW content or not and then fade
it in and out or hide it as needed so we we think it's quite exciting as a example of how
you can build a completely different idiom of twitter style threads and a large world model
on top of Matrix.
Another one would be element cool so this is a Zoom clone,
hopefully nobody at Zoom is listening, where we've gone and built it on top of the Matrix protocol
if I jump into a room like this and start the conference it's created a Matrix. "Oh hello
Amandine." This is my co-founder Amandine, who's demoing against me. So this has created the Matrix
room called hash metro on the Element cool server and I can just copy this uRK take my iPhone here
and go through to Safari on my iPhone and paste it in and hit go and it prompts me for permission to
the camera hit the join button and hey presto I should be able to jump straight like that sorry
yeah I can jump in straight like that on my phone without having to install any software. But the
interesting thing is that the protocol being used here is Matrix so it's end-to-end encrypted
using Signal-style encryption. It's decentralized. This could span multiple different servers
and, under the hood, it's just a Matrix chat room, but one which we're using to create a
decentralized Zoo-style experience. Another thing I can quickly show you is peer-to-peer Matrix
so Jay earlier described matrix as federated and everything that I've shown you so far is indeed federated. Now this i'm going to have to show my phones so you might need to look at video
feeds rather than my screen share briefly; but I'm going fast sharing so that you can
see this for sure. So my iPhone here i've got a peer-to-peer version of the Element app
and I can jump into a room on it like so you can see a whole bunch of random messages on my
android phone I have the same app here and I can jump in here and start saying things like I know
hi and messages come through. Now this is properly peer-to-peer, it's fully de-centralized. There is
no server here and I can prove this by going onto airplane mode on my iPhone like that and
send some more messages from Android and you can see them coming in here on my Android phone so
what's happened is that each app has actually got a server now built into it so even though this
doesn't have internet connectivity, it's using bluetooth to go and dynamically connect the two
together. It's really quite a magical experience such that if you don't have any 4G or wi-fi,
worst case you can go directly between the two. So that is where matrix is going in future:
historically federated but in future peer-to-peer hybrid as well. And then as a final quick demo is
something that no one has seen before, world first here, is a totally different experience
on top of Matrix, I'll just share my screen again. This one is called third room and it's a Metaverse
client built on top of Matrix. So you can see a bunch of chat rooms here called test world I can
go and jump into one of these and it has put me into a basic 3D environment which is built on top
entirely of matrix. So there are no servers here, no infrastructure apart from the Matrix protocol.
Now if I go and very quickly open up another window and jump into that same world
here then hopefully you can see this green cube here this green cube is actually my other user
here and if I move around on the right hand side and I jump a bit you can see that the other person
is interacting with that and it's very basic this is only a few days old but I can do things like
fire cubes out so I can look up in the sky and create a big stack of cubes which then go and
fall on top of me then we literally have created a matrix style, let's face it, the project's called
Matrix Virtual World which is entirely powered using the same social media environment so rather
than being stuck in a dystopia where Facebook has renamed themselves Meta from trying to co-opt
the Metaverse for their own commercial activity, here we have a completely decentralized open world
using the same technology or Matrix. That's -- welcome to Matrix.
That's phenomenal. And Matt, just that peer-to-peer matrix that you've achieved is amazing.
I mean, think about the use cases, folks. In the Amazon, peer-to-peer technology is being used between indigenous people who have to map their their territory without any internet. It can be used that way.
Quite famously, Dominic Tarr, who created Scuttlebutt did it because he lives on a boat in New Zealand and he just wanted to talk to the other boats in in his area. It could be used that way. I mean
that is really honestly game-changing and thank you for showing us and for revealing your
never-seen-before application of it. We'll come back to you because there are a lot of knotty,
k-n-o-t-t-y, hard questions about some of those things you showed, like the filters but I want
to introduce to you André Staltz. André comes to us from Finland, but he's building on something
called Scuttlebutt, which was first created in New Zealand. And Scuttlebutt is peer-to-peer and,
as you said, it can be used in Manyverse as a Facebook-like alternative without the bad stuff.
So André show us what you've got.
Great thanks, Wendy, for having me. I'm gonna actually start by
just showing my Manyverse on my phone. I suppose everybody can see this So there's a lot of content
going on, a lot of people here. It's really nice community. I just like to go to the top
and show here. Jay used to be on Scuttlebutt, this is Jay the other speaker she posted
a year ago she also followed Cinnamon. Cinnamon was a great person, a great contributor to our
community. Unfortunately, Cinnamon passed away and this talk will be dedicated to Cinnamon.
We love you. That's my little beginning my name is André Staltz and I created Manyverse five years
ago and I've been working on it since then, funded by donations. It's an open source app and it's
available for download on mobile and desktop and it's used by approximately 10 000 people so not
quite the scale of millions as matrix but there's an active community and we like that and we see
how it's going to grow in the future. How does Manyverse work and what is different about it?
So it works in a way that should be very familiar to you already. Everybody who has a smart phone has a very special app which works differently to the apps that you're used to
and that's the gallery app. Let me invite you to reflect a little bit on why it's different.
Every picture that you take with your camera is first stored on your phone. Now you might have a
cloud backup system but the photo lives primarily on your phone. It's available when you're offline,
there are no terms of service, because there is no service, there's no company taking care of it.
This creates a true sense of ownership and responsibility. There's no way that one day you wake up you open the gallery or the photos app and your photo is gone, because it was taken down.
That doesn't happen. So you own your content. And if you delete a picture there's no person that you
can call to and say, hey could you please recover it. So, therefore, responsibility. And pictures
don't just stay on your phone, so they're shared to all sorts of places so you can share them by
email, you can share them by social media apps, or even airdrop, to devices nearby.
Pictures are just content. So text is a different kind of content and social media is just text and pictures, so the big question is why can't social networking
work in a similar way to your photos app. And it can, that's what Manyverse does when you post on
Manyverse. It's just like you're taking a picture. It ends up as bytes stored on your device.
It's actually a pretty lonely experience, in the beginning. It's just like using the notes app
but what makes it truly social is when you share that post, and this happens automatically in
Manyverse, whenever you're connected to another person, your phone can create an encrypted connection with another phone and then they can automatically get a copy of your post to
the other phone, and this is how they can read it. They can interact with it. And this also works for
likes. So, a like is just a tiny piece of content which can also get copy pasted to the other side.
Now this is very important, and it's very different to platforms. There is no place where this conversation is happening. There is no
servers that are hosting this content and we're accessing it, that doesn't happen.
The data is just copy pasted from one phone to the other. And this is how people can interact.
It's really just a big community of people who are copy pasting their content to each other's phones,
but instead of a literal copy paste, it all happens automatically through a peer-to-peer protocol called SSB such that you don't have to think about,
okay now I'm going to copy this to that friend.
It all works under the hood automatically for you.
Our goal with Manyverse is to look and feel like a normal social networking experience such as
Facebook and Twitter and Linkedin, but under the hood, to fundamentally transform the heart
of social networking, because we want users to have the sense of ownership and responsibility
for their content, as well as to trust other users and to practice hospitality.
To address the question that was posed today, can peer-to-peer lead to less toxic
online platforms, can Manyverse lead to less toxic conversations online,
and my answer is absolutely yes. And there's three ways how we can achieve thatL: removing the media
from social media, reducing the inflow of random people, and emphasizing data hospitality. Social
media contains the word media, which means mass media. In other words, information broadcast.
It's the capability of informing the entire world about something. Social networking,
in my opinion, is different to social media. One of them is about having a network of friends and
about interacting with the friends of your friends as well. The other is about any individual being
capable of broadcasting information to the world and boosting that information via retweets.
I honestly think there is some value in mass media but the vast majority of use
cases for social networking do not need to become public information, such as talking to friends,
discovering people with common interests or hobbies, being part of small communities. None of that needs to be mass media. So virality is not something that's really built into Manyverse.
We think that websites are already pretty good, and newsletters as well, for broadcasting
information to the world. And reducing the inflow of random people. To join Manyverse,
you actually have to be invited by someone already on Manyverse, and this may disappoint a lot of
people because there's no way of searching for someone on Manyverse and following them.
But let me remind you that Manyverse is like the gallery app. It would be pretty weird and wrong
if a random stranger could suddenly take a peek into your gallery app, even if you didn't have a lot of personal photos. It's still very weird. The natural way
is for you to invite someone that you trust to gain access to your content. Turns out that if
everyone invites people they trust, then that already becomes a filter to prevent bad actors.
The only way a bad actor can enter into your Manyverse is if one of your friends invites them,
but that means that you also end up losing trust in your friend. And maybe you block them as well. So all of this creates incentive for people to think twice when they send an
invite and as a result there's virtually no bad actors or neighbors.
And finally, emphasizing data hospitality. If you're indeed copy pasting people's contents to
your phone then you're literally holding their data on your device and you don't
want to have illegal content on your device, you don't want to have toxic content here.
So this leads to you taking care of your phone's storage and deleting content that doesn't deserve
space. Which in turn means that you're taking an active role in pruning and caring for the social
network, deleting people that don't deserve to be heard. And my last slide is about adoption so
can this have any chance against Facebook and Twitter and Instagram?
Honestly I think it's pretty hard to compete with the network effects and the polished technologies
on these platforms. But there's one thing that we can count on, that they're pretty fragile
and every time those platforms tremble people install Manyverse. And this is not new to me. One
day it's just a billionaire buying the platform that causes people to lose their trust and look for alternatives. The other day it's Facebook that goes offline for a whole day. In other countries,
people who cannot use social networks anymore because they're an authoritarian government that
shut down the internet, this is this happens about like every single six months, in my experience.
So centralization is fragile. And every once in a while there's a crisis on the platform
and it shakes the people's trust in it. But on the other hand we really like social networking
and it's here to stay. And a lot of our society depends on. So my bet is that social networking needs resilience and Manyverse is an answer.
It's a network that's spread among thousands of devices, not on any single data center,
so it has a natural immune system against bad actors, the invites. Little by little,
over the course of decades throughout all of these crisis on the platforms, I believe people will discover that their own devices are the best place to store conversations online Thank you everybody.
Thank you so much André. Really, really interesting. I'd love to invite back Matthew and Jay
and we can tackle a few questions I want to warn our audience that we are going to go over the one hour mark
and if you have to leave us we understand but I think there's so many interesting things to talk about. Let's answer some of these questions. Billy and many others are asking
What are your thoughts on Mastodon?
I think Mastodon is not really an answer for power
for the problem of power abuse in in networks. One basic example is that all of your direct messages
from one to another person on another instance can be read by two people that are not involved in the
conversation. The admin of the instance you're on and the admin of the instance on the other side.
I think those problems can be very worrisome. And there's a lot of cases of instances that go
offline. Things are very it's very difficult. I think the federation model is is tricky,
and it's prone to a lot of politics and drama so I think a better model would not suffer from that
So in other words André, Mastodon is a federated system, so I may not be on somebody's centralized server but
I'm probably not running my own server, so I'm trusting Matthew to hold my stuff and then he
sends it to somebody who's on another server held by another person, and I can't really be sure that
Matthew's not peeking in on on my stuff, but I trust him and maybe I trust him more than I trust facebook because I know him and so I'm trading kind of proximity and closeness in this equation
You know the Mastodon, the dynamics which we've seen, it's got so much potential
and the good news is that the app, I personally think the user experience is pretty high and good
and it has been inspirational to a lot of people in the decentralized web community that it's possible to
get a pretty good level of polish but I completely agree with André's point that the moderation system is
just not fit for purpose. So the strategy that they took was to block servers on a server granularity so
if there is a particular instance run by somebody and for whatever reason you on your own instance
don't like that admin or a user on it or a community on it, who knows,
you basically could have the the thing that people do is to just
block it entirely so you get real fragmentation realm of censorship done just by the admin of the
server that you're on and it creates huge drama and it's very counterproductive and it's sort of
how not to do decentralized reputation whereas the approach that we've been looking into is the one that I briefly showed on Sierra Leone where you empower the users to decide who
um they talk to and where the content goes and so you it's very rare in matrix for somebody to actually stop two servers talking from one another because that would be drastic that's almost an
anti-net neutrality thing that you would sort of go and rip up the roads between the cities and
prevent people from being able to travel between them but instead you empower the users to make up
their own mind and it's, I mean, it obviously also has problems because the reputation lists
could be used by bad guys for your personal value of bad to find each other as well as the good guys
but it's a shame that mastodon has got stuck in this model and it's really a knee-jerk reaction
against some of the early shared block list activity that happened on twitter which got a lot
of bad press because it was abused because it was too naive and then they kind of threw the baby out
with the bath water and said right we're not going to do any shared block lists anymore, instead we're going to be even more nuclear and just stop entire populations talking to one another
So let's see if i understand this correctly. We have many questions around what, in our world, we call content moderation.
The balance between free speech, censorship, and bad speech. So let's just give you a hypothetical
Alright, in Manyverse, let's just say I got into your network and you and I are in the same social, Facebook-like platform
because I know a friend of yours and let's just say i'm a hate. monger. In fact I'm saying hateful
terrorist-level things. How would you get rid of my hate speech, André, in Manyverse?
Everything in SSB is kind of flipped upside down, so instead of free speech we have free listening,
which means if you're that kind of person I will block you and I won't read that anymore.
But the blocks are more consequential than on Twitter. On Twitter you could just make a new account and continue to interact with me on SSB. You would have to be re-invited
um or make a new account be re-invited and regain trust. It's a big deal,
and we we're going to develop a system. Basically there's a master's thesis by Alex Cable
and there's an algorithm called TrustNet, a system where basically if your friends,
so basically, if my friends would block you and I trust my friends enough,
then I would automatically block you as well. It's a way of sort of shielding the community so that I don't have to manually choose, oh there's that hateful person, I will block
them, but my friends on my behalf could help me auto block these kind of hateful interactions.
So André, I just have to say, taken to its extreme, don't you end up in a social network
only with people who share your views who are friendly and look like you, sound like you, think like you. Isn't that a danger to democracy as well?
I would like to say yes to that answer because it would create a little bit more shielded community,
but I think that is a different case than the so-called filter bubbles that we've seen in
modern social media. I think since always communities have been very sort of shielded and
you see this in, like, clubs and indigenous communities they're very still very, very shielded against outsiders and I think that's okay. I think we've operated in that
mode for a long time. What we've seen with filter bubbles on Facebook, et cetera, that is different,
it's fueled by all kinds of maximizing engaging type of features and virality
and I think that's different. I think to have communities and to have boundaries is healthy.
In Manyverse, I get privacy, I get some control over content and I'm trading kind of the universal access
to all thinkers for a closed comfortable group that I'm going to trust
That's where my trust comes from. Now let's talk about element and matrix
I am that hate monger, I'm in your Slack room, or your chat room. What do you do about me in Element?
Yes I mean the answer in the long term is really very similar to André's one, and the work that Alex Cable has done with trustnet is not dissimilar to the approach that we're taking
with Cerulean, except we're less about what we call transitive trust where if my friends trust
somebody as being good or bad then I inherit it. Instead we make it more explicit and let the users
choose really which reputation feeds they will mix together. So it could be that they automatically
inherit it from their friends, or it could be that they explicitly subscribe to, I don't know,
Obama or Trump or whatever their sort of favorite influencer, to use a horrible social media term,
who is publishing their reputation feeds and that would then effectively let the user control
the algorithm that they see. And to bounce on what André was saying earlier, the most important thing
that we see is the ability to visualize these filter bubbles. Like, the bubbles are a good thing
in the -- if you filter something, necessarily, you've created a bubble which is that filter . But the really toxic thing is if you can't see it and if you can't curate it and change it.
So today on Facebook you have no way of knowing what's content has been randomly filtered from
you and you have no way of changing what you get shown. Similarly on Twitter today. But in real
life um, no, if I want to go into some dodgy bar right now and hang out with a bunch of Neo-Nazis
I can and I know what I'm doing I can see who it is and I know that it exists and I
choose to do so, I choose not to. Whereas you don't typically have that flexibility on
social media, either centralized or decentralized today. But that is very much the model that we're
looking at, to almost gamify the curation and visualization of the reputation feeds,
literally visualizing it as a map, like a 2D map, you look at all of the communities out there and you say well this big block of people empirically all hang out in
Nazi rooms so i'm going to stick a flag in that and I'm going to dial down the volume on that one, but this community over here are all I know the METRO community and I think they're great and
I'm going to stick a pin in there and dial up the volume and so tune the content that I can see out there on the network. Now there are risks to doing it this way because obviously
it allows bad people to find bad stuff as well as good people to find good stuff, but it's better that than having a authoritarian view dictated by Zuckerberg's censorship monkeys.
Okay, so let me see if i can put this in real terms for our viewers.
Right now i'm on Twitter and I am a Neo-Nazi espousing hate and violence
so probably in Twitter today or Facebook certainly there are thousands of content moderators that
they've hired to find me and block me, or at least put a little, you know, "be careful of this woman"
and many people would call that censorship and let's just say you're warned and Matthew sees
me and he decides "I'm never going to listen to her again, I'm going to block her." It's kind of a binary thing. I'm going to listen to her or I'm going to block her. But in Element or Matrix, you
could just dial me down, you could make me 10% of your algorithm so you don't have to see me every
time but you know once in a while you want to turn me on and see what's happening with me. And then there are these reputation lists, right, and so you're creating these new interfaces so I can kind
of see the communities and where they live and you realize that I am in the hate-mongering Neo-Nazi
community and so you can stay away from that. But okay what you just said if I'm a Neo-Nazi
looking for other Neo-Nazis, you've just made it incredibly easy for me to find congregate,
organize. You're end-to-end encrypted, I could be fomenting violence and war and no one would know
Oh except people would know because the same technology that allows the Nazis to go and find
each other and hang out, which already exists in the real life today, and I go down to Google, when I search where can I find other answers I'll get a whole bunch of results coming up and so I could
go on the Internet Archive and I could go and you know look through the historical archives to see where people bad people hang out and then the problem of basically policing society to make sure
that you know America doesn't turn into a fascist Nazi haven or whatever the problem might be
ends up being the job of the conventional authorities, for better or worse, because just as if the cops fought that a bunch of terrorists are hanging out in the bar and getting ready to do
some dastardly crime, they're going to infiltrate it, and they're going to do a sting operation,
they're going to arrest everybody, the same things which work very well in real life can be applied
here to use the same technology. So it's -- I find it quite fascinating that people do
go and proudly declare that if -- I know ISIS, for instance, uses Matrix. We can't stop ISIS
from using Matrix because I can't stop them using the web or email or any other technology and they
actively recruit and they literally stick a flag in their heads of their room saying if you want to go and cause trouble in the Middle East, this is where you should go and get involved. But by
so doing I imagine that they're probably going to be on the radar of many intelligence services who
are interested in what bad stuff ISIS is doing. It's really a question of having the freedom of
information. It's just like the Internet Archive has a mandate to archive everything and know
we're in the same position and that's the ethical responsibility on us to then empower the users to
be able to navigate that information effectively and safely and not accidentally fall into cess
pits or you know find obnoxious content if they unless they really, really were in that mode.
Well let's stick with the ISIS example. Let's say i post a beheading video.
Right now in almost every social media platform, they will take that down, because they have the power to do that. It's on their servers. In your systems,
where there are no servers or where they're federated servers, could you take it down?
You can in Matrix on a on a given server. So what we are already doing is publishing reputation
lists of stuff that you will not want on your server, assuming that you are
in a no country where child abuse is illegal and heading terrorist content is illegal, then we
will publish already plot lists for these rooms and by default people who join the network can
run a server one of the first things they will do is to go and subscribe to these reputation feeds and make sure that those rooms can never hit it on the server. But unlike Mastodon,
where you're blocking an entire random server community of people, in Matrix, you're literally just blocking the individuals or specific rooms which are known to be toxic. Now if you want to
get a visit from the Feds, you might choose not to engage that plot list and you might then join
all of these rooms and book plane tickets to Syria, whatever does it for you and, okay, that's
a choice you might want to make, and you'll probably regret but, for everybody else who
doesn't have nefarious purposes, either they will just use that existing block lists
André, how would you handle it? I just want to say that they're servers in Scuttlebut, but they're very different to the servers in a federated system. The servers in Scuttlebutt they
don't hold any data whatsoever. There really is no data there. They are just a meeting point, so
two people can be connected to the same server and then those two people will have an encrypted connection. So this means that if we know about a content, some
beheading content, let's say, we cannot take it down from the service because it's not on the
surface to begin with. But it's useful to think of the social network as, like, as a
spider web, you know, there's like this part and there's that part, and I think a person who is
doing that kind of violence, they are connected with other kind of people. And those people,
they are -- so this is kind of like a gradient. So the people who are connected to the very violent people are somewhat violent but not extremely violent and then so forth. So if I
block enough people, that content won't reach me. And so our answer is that we can't control what
other people have. Like, I cannot delete a picture from your phone even if I would like to
but I can be far enough from you so that I will not get your content and I will not pass it
forward. So that is our approach, and it's really fundamental that we have to say we cannot do that,
because if we say that we can do it, then we have a power to do otherwise as well.
We can take something good and we can remove it. So I think the the question here is not
do I choose to do good or do I choose to do bad with the power that I have. The question is do
I choose to not have that power or to have that power. And I think it's important that we learn
from these centralized platforms that they have power. And we've learned about the problems that
that thing has. Zuckerberg has done a pretty okay job running Facebook, with quotation marks please.
but what if Facebook would be bought by someone extremely horrible for society like,
let's say, Putin or someone. You know, that power should not exist is is my point.
Eloquently said, André. We're taking the power. but with power comes responsibility and that's what these decentralized networks
would do they put the responsibility for what we see what we say who we associate
with back in our own hands. Now you said there was one takeaway you wanted everyone to have at the end of this hour. What was that?
Decentralization really is coming of age now as you've seen from the demos on both the Manyverse
and SSB and the Matrix and Elements side. We've gone from being sort of science projects to
something that can genuinely be a contender to the Twitters and the Slacks and the Whatsapp
social media experiences and I think it's a real turning point. Jay had her pendulum
earlier or her kind of twisty spiral going from centralization to decentralization and I believe
we are at the fastest moving point on that curve as the pendulum swings from one side to the other
and in the kind of utopia vision where Elon turns up and uses his autocraticness to set Twitter
free and make it democratize for everybody and possibly build it on a decentralized protocol like
any of the ones we've been talking about that could change everything you know twitter could
become a search engine say a bit like Google exists on the open web, Twitter could be an ad
and a search company just like Google is today except on top of Blue Sky or Matrix or SSB or
any other decentralized thing. So in the good scenario Elon sets Twitter free, that would be
fascinating. In the dystopia where he then becomes emperor over the galaxy of
Twitter and moderation is what he thinks is good then we're all doomed
and I for one will be moving everything to SSB, Matrix and Mastodon as rapidly as I can.
Thank you, thank you so much for staying over. Thank you for explaining about this power balance
and this power, this moment that we're in and we do this for all of you because we want you
to know that you have the power. You can take back the power but you have to understand it, and understand your responsibility. Thank you, everyone, for being here.
Fascinating. Fascinating. And I wanted just to remind you that this is the fourth of six
sessions, there's two more to go we're the last Thursday of every month. The next one is about
the Metaverse and the next big thing. and yes that starts with an N -- NFTs -- and then finally we'll
be looking at the ethics of the decentralized web and how it's being used in humanitarian work in
journalism and in the law. One more thing, I want to push this incredible guide written by
Aditi Shah created by Iryna Nezhynska, it has much more resources, videos, deeper dive articles,
many, many things, if you want to learn more. So we'll send that to you, there's a link that we're dropping in the chat. It's on Internet Archive, it's on getdweb.net
it's on metro.org. We want you to use this, share it, and and learn with us. Okay, thanks so much.
― | (Latham Green), Monday, 21 November 2022 03:49 (one year ago) link