Twitter Needs to Be Decentralized
The call for a decentralized Twitter speaks to deeper motives than profit: good engineering and social justice. Done right, a decentralized one-to-many communications mechanism could boast a resilience and efficiency that the current centralized Twitter does not. Decentralization isn’t just a better architecture, it’s an architecture that resists censorship and the corrupting influences of capital and marketing. At the very least, decentralization would make tweeting as fundamental and irrevocable a part of the Internet as email. Now that would be a triumph of humanity.
The former head of Twitter’s platform team, however—who left to join a startup called BankSimple—says he has come to agree with those who see Twitter as having a higher calling: namely, to become a decentralized communications network for the digital age, or what Om has called a messaging bus for the real-time Web. We raised the issue in a post earlier this year of whether there needs to be more than one Twitter, in part as a result of the network’s repeated downtime issues, but also because the service has grown to become such a crucial news delivery system for many people.
