Twitter reaches for the sky from shaky ground
About eight years ago, I visited South Africa and toured Robben Island, where the apartheid regime had imprisoned the great human rights activist and statesman Nelson Mandela. In the defunct yet preserved facility’s courtyard, there is a garden that Madiba had tended to during his incarceration. Each day he would go out into this garden, surrounded by the prison walls, and gaze into the sky while envisioning himself free, and for that moment, he’d forget where he was and experience contentment.
It’s absurd to analogize Mandela’s experience to the plight of today’s Internet users. But I’d be lying if I said the story hadn’t informed my perspective on what constitutes a “walled garden,” the users’ place within it, and most of all, how one should relate to the watchers on the wall.
In 2019, Twitter announced it would be embarking upon a new initiative to “decentralize social media.” Dubbed Bluesky, the project aims to create an open standard for the syndication of social media content that attaches proof of the author’s identity using the blockchain in currently unspecified ways. After sitting on it for a year-and-a-half, the company finally announced a project lead this past August and recently launched a website describing the project’s goals:
The web. Email. RSS feeds. XMPP chats. What all these technologies had in common is they allowed people to freely interact and create content, without intermediaries.
We’re focusing on re-building the social web by connecting disconnected silos and returning control of the social experience to users. Our mission is to develop and drive the adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.
Pardon me while I roll my eyes. Twitter already has the power to decentralize social media and has consistently worked instead to ensure that they remain in control of the public conversation and that users remain firmly ensconced within their walled garden.
“The web. Email. RSS feeds.”
Yeah, okay, let’s talk about RSS. When introduced in 1999, RSS was a novel concept: A way to read content from all of your favorite websites without having to visit each one individually. Instead of maintaining an exhaustive list of bookmarks and visiting a dozen or more sites each day, you could stream all the content in which you were interested to one convenient application. This syndication format was especially well-suited to a new type of digital publishing that would soon come into vogue called web logging or “blogging” for short, one that would get a considerable boost from the introduction of a new platform called Blogger.com.
Blogger simplified the process of publishing content to, and sharing content from, your own website (it used FTP to upload static assets to your server) and took that sharing exponentially further by adding RSS feeds to the platform. The technologies both benefitted greatly from each other, increasing one another’s adoption. Every major news publisher had their journalists blogging, and RSS feeds on their homepages within a couple of years.
With that mission accomplished and out of the way, Blogger soon started taking an interest in the concept of audio blogging recently introduced by one of the RSS specification’s authors, Dave Winer. They launched Odeo, which gave users a phone number to call and record a short audio message to post directly to their blog. These audio posts were then syndicated around the web via RSS using Winer’s new format. Others started using these so-called “RSS enclosures” to do long-form audio content, about which Apple, for some reason, got very excited. They just went ahead and added support for it in iTunes. And thus, a new medium was born: Podcasting.
In 2003, Blogger’s founder Ev Williams (who owns the godforsaken site you’re on right now) decided to focus on Odeo full-time and sold Blogger to Google, who summarily drove it into the ground. But within a short time, Odeo had dropped the audio idea. They decided to focus instead on SMS messages (which were becoming the new it thing) and relaunched as a “microblogging” platform called Twttr, where SMS would effectively replace RSS.
It wasn’t tenable. After all, Twitter was ultimately an idea born from RSS. And everyone was now using RSS — it had total penetration. So within six months of launching, Twitter had no choice but to add RSS support; otherwise, no one was going to be reading jack (pun intended). But there was one catch: Whereas many, if not most, blogs back then allowed users to leave comments without registering for an account, Twitter required registration to respond to tweets. Anyone following Twitterers via RSS who wanted to reply would have to create a Twitter account. This would ensure audience capture.
And so, one day, five years later, with a large segment of the audience sufficiently captured, the birdsite started singing a different tune. In 2011, the company quietly disappeared RSS feeds from users’ profile pages, and a few months later, shut the feeds off altogether. Now you had to go to Twitter to read tweets (and be bombarded with ads and the insistence that you create an account). The intent was obvious: To steer whatever audience that remained outside of Twitter into the walled garden. And frankly, the strategy worked. Within two years, Google pulled the plug on their beloved Google Reader RSS client. With it died the highly decentralized, community-built, open-protocol, and standards-driven blogosphere, atop whose ruins the closed-source, non-interoperable, toxically-managed, surveillance-capitalist Twittersphere was built. (And then Medium arrived to tap dance on its grave, stuffing blogging’s remains into its own walled garden. Thanks Ev!)
But it doesn’t end there! In addition to closing itself off from the rest of the web and closing its users in, Twitter has placed increasingly onerous restraints on developers using the Twitter API, which has resulted in third-party Twitter clients having to remove functions as essential as notifications because they “replicate Twitter’s core experience or features.” You can’t even share your own tweets on your own website anymore without having to embed Twitter’s ridiculous widget (like the one below) with whatever tracking software accompanies it! It’s preposterous!
But here’s the kicker. The Twitter Developer Agreement explicitly states that you may not:
Use Twitter Content or other data collected from people to create or maintain a separate conversational platform, social network, status update, private messaging or live broadcasting database or service
In other words, you may not talk to anyone on Twitter except using Twitter’s apps, nor use Twitter to publish content to any other social platform. And we’re expected to believe they want interoperability across a decentralized social web? To that I say, L-O-fucking-L!
Color me skeptical when Twitter says their goal is to promote a decentralized web and foster more open conversation. While it’s heartening to hear the folks behind Mastodon, Beaker Browser, ActivityPub, and IPFS are involved in the discussions taking place, I have zero illusions as to Twitter’s intentions. I could be convinced otherwise if they brought back user RSS feeds, reopened their developer API, and contributed to the already-existing open standards for decentralized social media instead of trying to force a new one on us.* Until then, it just sounds like a new way to fleece crypto investors by using the development of open standards as a front, much like most other open-source “web3” initiatives with a blockchain attached.
The web is already decentralized — you just walled yourselves off from it.
*They could also restore my accounts which they permanently suspended for fighting back against the racists they refuse to keep off their platform and instead give ‘Verified’ status, but that’s a topic for a different post.
