Bluesky, Twitter's open source arm, has released early code for a decentralized social networking protocol. The system, known as the authentication data experiment (or ADX), can be tested by developers on GitHub, although bluesky emphasizes that it is incomplete. This is one of the most substantive windows for bluesky to understand its work since it conceived the project in 2019 and officially incorporated it in early 2022.
Jay Graber, CEO of bluesky, said ADX would be the beginning of a semi open development process. "We need to take a middle path and release before the work is completed, but also give ourselves time to discuss new directions at an early stage. The GitHub repository includes an overview of the objectives and design of ADX and some experimental code. Please play freely, but don't try to build your next large social application on this basis. The code is provided under the MIT open source license."
ADX is not a single, independent social network design. It is a protocol built around a user controlled "personal data repository" that social network developers can choose to support. Among other things, it allows users to transfer social media posts or participation between networks without compromising the network's own audit options. "On the web, this data exists on the social platform that created it. In ADX, this data will exist in the personal data repository owned by users," the overview explained. Platforms can choose to index only these contents - distinguish between "voice" or the ability to save data in the repository and "coverage" or the ability to see the data on a specific platform.
ADX appeared a week after Tesla and SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk reached an agreement to acquire twitter. One of Musk's plans is to "open source the [twitter ] algorithm" to increase trust in the platform. But bluesky is a pre-existing initiative with somewhat different goals. Former CEO Jack Dorsey announced in 2019 that Twitter would fund research on a decentralized version of its service. Greber joined in 2021 and bluesky was founded in February 2022. It is a public welfare company focusing on "large-scale adoption of open and decentralized public dialogue technology".
Twitter can adopt the protocol created by bluesky, but the two companies can also run on a completely independent track, and Twitter has no direct control. "Twitter's funding for bluesky is not subject to any conditions, but only one condition: bluesky wants to research and develop technologies that can realize open and decentralized public dialogue," bluesky's team sent a twitter message after the acquisition.
Bluesky has joined an area that has been occupied by several decentralized network protocols, including activitypub, which provides technical support for the mastodon platform. But its researchers emphasize that they are trying to learn and develop from these efforts rather than simply copy them. For the controversial social networking industry, ADX is a long-awaited progress.
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