When Twitter emerged in 2006, with its revolutionary 140-character microblogging platform, it didn’t take long for it to grow into the most powerful force in global information transmission. The site effectively cut out the middleman, loosening established media’s grip on shaping public opinion. Donald Trump was once the most powerful man in the world. He coopted the platform, until Twitter silenced it in January 2021. Elon Musk was a wealthy man who seriously thought about buying the platform.

But there’s that whole great power/great responsibility equation, and a growing chorus of people from decentralization idealists to governments to ticked-off consumers feel that control of the world’s leading social networks by a few for-profit corporations is bad for society. One of Twitter’s most outspoken critics is Evan Henshaw-Plath, 45, a little-known coder, who was Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s boss at a small tech platform called Odeo when they first started working on what was to become the microblogging site.

Henshaw-Plath also hired Blaine Cook, who would go on to be Twitter’s chief architect, and helped brainstorm an early version of Twitter that could federate with rivals into a decentralized system. This federation, if launched on Groundhog Day 2008 when it was finished, would have stopped Trump from getting such a powerful megaphone. It also gave users greater control over their networks. It would also have taken away a huge part of Dorsey’s ability to censor the then-president.

“If this had taken off and if this had worked, there would not have been a Zuckerberg. There would not have been a Jack,” says Mark Atwood, now the principal engineer of Amazon.com’s open-source program, who snapped a photo of the achievement, captioned “historic moment.” “We would live in a fundamentally different world right now,” adds Cook, who now works at media giant Condé Nast. “The fact that Facebook and Twitter control the business models of so many media corporations, at some point becomes untenable.”

“And those corporations, if they’re smart, will move to models they can control the economic model a little bit more.”

There is a movement underway now to reverse the clock and make future social networks give back control. Fed up with watching from the sideline while others try to make this happen and fail, Henshaw-Plath, who also goes by Rabble, is now the CEO of Planetary.Social, one of dozens of networks being built by developers who have decided the risks of so much power centralized in one company aren’t worth the benefits.

Henshaw-Plath was among 450 others who met at Camp Navarro, a camp in Northern California’s Redwood Forest, to discuss how they could reclaim social media. Representatives of every major decentralized social media platform, including some from as far away as China were there, as was Jay Graber, CEO …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron