Jack Dorsey s Former Boss Is Building A Decentralized Twitter Jack Dorsey - Twitter HEAD TOPICS

Jack Dorsey s Former Boss Is Building A Decentralized Twitter

10/22/2022 8:45:00 PM

A little-known group of interoperable social networks has been growing in private for years but now that an engineer behind Twitter s pilot Evan Henshaw-Plath has joined the fray the parallel universe is verging on mainstream

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A little-known group of interoperable social networks has been growing in private for years, but now that an engineer behind Twitter ’s pilot, Evan Henshaw-Plath has joined the fray, the parallel universe is verging on mainstream. A little-known group of interoperable social networks has been growing in private for years, but now that an engineer behind Twitter ’s pilot, Evan Henshaw-Plath has joined the fray, the parallel universe is verging on mainstream. 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 rivals into a decentralized system. If launched on Groundhog Day 2008, when it was completed, that federation would have prevented Trump from obtaining such a powerful megaphone in the first place by giving users more control over their network. It would also have taken away a huge part of Dorsey’s ability to censor the then president. Read more:
Forbes » Mike Lee Highlights How Electing Evan McMullin Would Give Democrats a Senate Majority What Adam Kinzinger says about Evan McMullin, Mike Lee, Capitol riot Snap investors, do you still trust Evan Spiegel? Jaguars’ Evan Engram ‘couldn’t be more excited’ for old Giants team’s success

Biden says it s his intention to run again in 2024 CNN Politics

President Joe Biden said Friday that while he has not made a formal decision about running for reelection in 2024, it is his 'intention' to do so. Read more >> Mike Lee Highlights How Electing Evan McMullin Would Give Democrats a Senate MajoritySen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) campaign highlighted how Utah independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin is backed by Democrats and how his potential election would only empower Senate Democrats. Lol sound scared Lee is shitting his pants. Evan McMullin is Democrat and won’t admit it. At the age of 45 He conveniently got married to a widow with five children. His ego has kept him from being honest with the good people of Utah as he systematically attacks Senator Mike who upholds the most basic of Utahs values. What Adam Kinzinger says about Evan McMullin, Mike Lee, Capitol riotRep. Adam Kinzinger, one of only two Republicans on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, was in Utah campaigning for independent Senate candidate Evan McMullin on Thursday. Vote, vote, vote! Lee is a traitor! Kinzinger and McMuffin are both clowns. Who’s suit did McMullin borrow? What a clown. Snap investors, do you still trust Evan Spiegel?OPINION: As Snap stock heads toward its lowest prices since March 2020, the question is even more important, and answering “yes” should be even harder, writes columnist tpoletti. Jaguars’ Evan Engram ‘couldn’t be more excited’ for old Giants team’s successIt would be understandable if Evan Engram looked at the timing of the Giants’ breakthrough and allowed himself to wonder, “Why now?” He’s so bad haha Review: Columbus natives Evan Westfall and Taylor Meier of Caamp say 'thank you' during Friday concertColumbus natives Evan Westfall and Taylor Meier of Caamp performed their first arena show Friday night in Nationwide Arena to enthusiastic fans. Snap Inc. co-founders see their net worths drop over year: reportSnap Inc. co-founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy have seen their respective net worths drop precipitously in a year, Bloomberg reported Friday. Oh well. Evan “Rabble” Henshaw-Plath, poses at the MIT Media Lab in August 2022, where he spoke about decentralized social media at the Imagination In Action Event, cohosted by Link Ventures, MIT Connection Science and Forbes.that McMullin would end up caucusing with Democrats if he were elected..When Snap Inc. Katherine Taylor 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. Both caucus with the Democrats and receive their committee assignments from that caucus. Donald Trump, formerly the most powerful person in the world, co-opted the unfiltered platform until Twitter silenced him in January 2021. Elon Musk, the wealthiest person on the planet, seriously considered buying it. Joe has often said he is more valuable to Republicans as a Democrat. 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. As Snap again reported disappointing results Thursday and saw the stock plunge again, the company decided now was the time to initiate a stock buyback plan, promising to spend up to $500 million to offset the dilution from employee stock plans — in the past nine months, Snap has spent $937 million on stock-based compensation. 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. That means they control the agenda on the floor of the Senate and chair the committees which gives them total control of the hearings as well as the subpoena process to compel witnesses to come before the committee. 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 rivals into a decentralized system. If launched on Groundhog Day 2008, when it was completed, that federation would have prevented Trump from obtaining such a powerful megaphone in the first place by giving users more control over their network. It means that Biden can continue to nominate very liberal judges to the federal court system. 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. The Lee campaign also highlighted that prominent Democrats and leftist celebrities are backing McMullin’s bid to oust Lee: Former Democratic Presidential Candidate Andrew Yang Current Democratic Senator Jon Tester Rob Reiner, actor, filmmaker, and Democrat donor Mark Hammill, actor and Democrat donor Barbara Streisand, actor and Democrat donor Former National Democratic Chairman Howard Dean Former Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey, Nebraska Former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn, Georgia A. Spiegel alone can exercise voting control over a majority of our outstanding capital stock. 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. Balukoff, 2018 Democrat Gubernatorial Candidate in Idaho Ambassador William Eacho, President Obama’s Ambassador to Austria Rod Womer, Woka Foundation Joel Ruben, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for President Obama Former Democratic Congressman Ben McAdams Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson Utah Democratic Party Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall Former Attorney General Candidate Greg Skordas Pamela Lowery, Planned Parenthood Josh Kanter, Alliance for a Better Utah Brian King, Minority Leader for the Utah House Democrats This also includes tens of thousands of dollars from Democrat lobbyists: Daniella Landau, HLP&R Strategies Michael Levy, Brownstein Hyatt Scott Nelson, K&L Gates Amy Tejral, Avenue Solutions Joseph Britton, Pioneer Public Affairs Nelson Cunningham, McCarty Associates Dwight Fettig, Porterfield, Fettig and Sears Melanie Nathanson, Nathanson Hauck Ben O’Neil, Mcguire Woods Michela Sims, Sims Strategies Michael Smith, Cornerstone Govt.” “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. A report found that self-proclaimed independent McMullin paid $1.” “And those corporations, if they’re smart, will move to models they can control the economic model a little bit more. In the third quarter, its revenue grew a paltry 6%, down from the most recent second-quarter revenue growth of 13%. ” Blaine Cook and Ralph Meijer on Groundhog Day 2008 in front of a schematic of their federated version of Twitter and Jaiku. He also uses ActBlue, a Democrat fundraising platform, rather than WinRed, a Republican fundraising tool. Mark Atwood / Flickr / Creative Commons A movement is now under way to make that happen; to turn back the clock on what might have been and force future social networks to give control back to their users. Fed up with watching from the sidelines while others try to make this happen and fail, Henshaw-Plath, who also goes by “Rabble,” is now the CEO of Planetary. Follow him on Twitter.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. In August, Henshaw-Plath joined a group of 450 collaborators, privacy advocates, crypto-anarchists, libertarians and others at Camp Navarro in the towering redwood forest of northern California to plot how to take back social media and the internet itself. Top executives didn’t seem to see any of those challenges coming early enough, and did not do enough about them once they did. Representatives of every major decentralized social media platform, including some from as far away as China were there, as was Jay Graber, CEO of Twitter’s decentralized social portfolio company, Bluesky. “The Trump deplatforming is fascinating because what was a fairly esoteric, edgy, nerdy concept became central to the public political debate,” says Henshaw-Plath. “The problem is that one institution and one set of businesses decide the speech rules for everybody. And the decentralized Web community and decentralized social media community thinks we shouldn't live in a world where a few people decide that. We should live in a world where we have many protocols, and many different communities.” In the company’s shareholder letter, Spiegel acknowledged that the results were “far from our aspirations,” and that Snap would use this time of reduced demand “to pull forward and accelerate changes to our advertising platform and auction dynamics that we believe will deliver better results for our advertising partner. ” Dorsey, who is now on the Bluesky board, left as CEO of Twitter in 2021 and didn’t reply to multiple requests to speak with Forbes for this article. Twitter provided information about Bluesky on background, but declined to comment on details about Dorsey. Danny O'Brien, senior fellow of the Filecoin Foundation, Planetary founder Evan Henshaw-Plath and Spritely Institute CTO Christine Lemmer-Webber at the DWeb Camp in August 2022. Brad Shirakawa Long before Henshaw-Plath’s team helped Dorsey write some of the first lines of code for Twitter’s prototype, he worked on the Indymedia project, a publishing platform that let activists organize and monitor police activity. By the 2004 U. Investors have to make a leap of faith that Spiegel can turn things around, but they need to remember that Spiegel usually thinks about himself first. S. presidential election, the platform had grown to 175 collectives around the world and hosted 40,000 messages. After licking his wounds when their candidate lost the election, Henshaw-Plath responded to a blog post from Evan Williams seeking someone to help future Twitter cofounders Christopher “Biz” Stone and Noah Glass create Odeo, a platform to help podcasters make money. When the effort didn’t get traction, Dorsey pitched a pet project he’d been working on for years that used SMS messages to send group texts. “We had such an ability to invent cutting-edge new Web2 websites and technologies, basically because of Rabble’s work,” says Tony Stubblebine, who Henshaw-Plath also hired at Odeo and who was appointed CEO of Medium last month. “Then that translated to Twitter, where we got our first Twitter prototype up in three weeks maybe. And I think if it had taken longer than that we wouldn’t have bothered.” While the original, aborted version of a decentralized Twitter was built using the same messaging standard as Google Cloud Messaging and Facebook Chat, a number of technical innovations have recently surfaced, enabling an even more open and decentralized architecture. In January 2018, early blockchain-based social network Steemit exploded to its peak of about a $2 billion market value and Henshaw-Plath took his first job at a blockchain startup, seeking to learn from the inside about the technology that connects people without middlemen. Though blockchains’ decentralized infrastructures might seem perfect for connecting friends on a social network, Henshaw-Plath was eventually turned off by their reliance on cryptocurrency. “Our feeling was that the primary social interaction should be based on intrinsic motivation,” says Henshaw-Plath. “If you integrate financial incentives into everything, then it can make it into a financial game. And then all of a sudden, people aren’t there because of their human connection and collaboration.” Users, it would seem, agree. Steemit fell 94% from its all-time high to about $107 million today. Henshaw-Plath started looking for alternatives. “Eventually,” he says, “I discovered a protocol created by this guy who lives on a sailboat in New Zealand.” That is Dominic Tarr, an eccentric, open-source developer who lives just off the coast of Auckland on a Wharram catamaran named Yes Let’s he found on the side of a road . Tired of being unable to send emails to his friends from his Pacific Ocean location, Tarr wrote software that uses technology similar to Apple’s Airdrop to create a protocol that lets anyone build social networks where information moves like gossip, directly from phone to phone—no internet service provider required. Entrepreneurs using the protocol get to choose their own business models, their own designs and how their systems function. Users, meanwhile, can move freely from network to network. Tarr called the software Secure Scuttlebutt after the cask that stored water on old sailboats, which is also maritime slang for “gossip,” as in conversations held around a water cooler. “Modern capitalism believes that what people want is convenience,” says Tarr. “But I think what people actually want is a sense of control.” Scuttlebutt itself isn’t supported by venture capital. Instead, taking a page from the way Tim Berners-Lee funded the creation of the World Wide Web, Scuttlebutt is backed by grants that helped jump-start the process. Similar to a distributed autonomous organization (DAO) that connects groups on a blockchain, there are now hundreds of users who personally donate to the cause and an estimated 30,000 people using one of at least six social networks on the protocol. An estimated 4 million more use the largest social protcol, Mastodon, which supports 60 niche social networks, with a rapidly growing pool of blockchain competitors in the works. Joining Henshaw-Plath at the redwoods camp, called DWeb, were 14 other Scuttlebutt developers–including those from the Manyverse social network, designed for free-speech purists, and the Maori social network Āhau. While Manyverse is largely funded by a grant from the European Union and donor support and Āhau by tribal money and other sources, Henshaw-Plath is going a more traditional route. In 2019, he raised $1.4 million in pre-seed funding from his old Odeo boss Stone; former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan; Bloomberg Beta, the venture-capital arm of media giant Bloomberg; and Ethereum startup ConsenSys, to build a social network where anyone can make public posts, share images, like content and send private messages without an online connection. Instead of being hosted by Facebook, Twitter or another social network, the data is kept by users and their friends. Though decentralized social networking is proving a difficult way to make money, Henshaw-Plath has plans to sell support services. Bloomberg Beta founder Roy Bahat isn’t concerned about short-term monetization efforts. A Planetary investor and early backer of AngelList and Slack, he says that “anytime something has reached mass-market use, the owners of that service have figured out some way to realize business value.” After a slow start, Facebook last year generated $119 billion revenue, almost entirely from selling ads targeted at specific users. Twitter’s top line was $5 billion. While anyone can create an account on Planetary by generating a private key only they know, similar to bitcoin, if a user loses their phone or the private key is stolen they can recover their identity from other members of their network who store encrypted copies of each other’s information. But even with such user-centric technology, free speech here isn’t entirely free. To conform with Apple’s terms of service, moderators have the ability to ban users who post certain kinds of content. An important difference between social networks built on Scuttlebutt and Twitter, though, blacklisted users can simply pick up and move their accounts to a more lax competitor, such as Manyverse, founded by 34-year-old André “Staltz” Medeiros, a Brazilian living in Finland. “My motivation started with 2016, when I saw Trump gaining power via social media, and I thought of the great power that social media holds for society,” says Medeiros. “I would have made a similar choice that Jack Dorsey did to ban Trump. But I think the power to ban a president is a very, very strong power. I think that’s an extremely huge power. And I'm concerned.” It turns out that Dorsey, too, was concerned, even before it happened. In the winter of 2016, as Henshaw-Plath says Dorsey was facing calls to ban the president and far-right extremists, he visited the San Francisco headquarters of Dorsey’s other company, then known as Square (now Block) to advise his former underling on how to proceed. It was a pivotal moment for social networks. Though it is unclear how much input Henshaw-Plath had into the decision, Dorsey briefly banned white supremacist Richard Spencer and right-wing extremist group the Proud Boys that November. Click here to subscribe to the Forbes CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor. Perhaps already seeing the difficult decision he might soon have to make, and even regretting the decision not to federate Twitter with other social networks when he initially had the chance, in December 2019 Dorsey tweeted that the social network would fund Bluesky, “an open and decentralized standard for social media.” With a mission similar to Scuttlebutt, Dorsey said Bluesky would make it easier to comply with rules in multiple international jurisdictions by allowing for more diverse applications and give users control over the algorithms that determined how they view content. “The goal,” Dorsey wrote in a at the time, “is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. ” Two years later, in January 2021, Dorsey banned Trump from Twitter, calling the decision a failure “to promote healthy conversation. And a time for us to reflect on our operations and the environment around us.” Facebook, Instagram and others followed suit shortly thereafter, further fracturing the global social-media landscape. “For a long time, the decentralized social ecosystem was all people on the left, trying to make things more participatory,” says Henshaw-Plath. “And then all of a sudden, we had all these people on the right who were being deplatformed. ” Trump briefly moved to centralized social site Parler, before its internet service was pulled, forcing him to a more open technical standard originally developed by Berners-Lee’s nonprofit World Wide Web Consortium. Called ActivityStream—and developed in part by Henshaw’s former employee Cook—the open standard lets developers build an interoperable federation of decentralized applications, similar to Scuttlebutt, but for more than just social networks. Imagine being able to send a message from Twitter to Meetup, or Facebook to Hacker News, just like email. By the time Trump was looking for an alternative to Twitter, a subset of ActivityStream for the microblogging site’s competitors, called Mastodon, was already powering more than 40 federated, interoperable social networks, or nodes. Notably, the alt-right Gab. com moved to the shared platform after it was shut down by its hosting provider for supporting hate speech posted by a gunman who killed 11 people. Using the same platform, in February of this year, Trump Media & Technology Group launched Truth Social, which has now been downloaded an estimated 3 million times. Blockchain-based competitors include Andreessen Horowitz-backed Decentralized Social, which raised $200 million and whose Deso token market cap is valued at $71 million and Tinder cofounder Christopher Gulczynski’s Niche built on the Near Protocol. In December 2021 Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian’s Seven Seven Six venture firm and Ethereum developer Polygon MATIC set aside $200 million to invest in decentralized social media. Hosted by the nonprofit Internet Archive, DWeb Camp gathered more than 400 attendees for four days to plan how the internet might function differently with less control by large technology giants. Brad Shirakawa The splintering of social media goes far beyond just political squabbles in the United States. Two months after Trump launched Truth Social, the European Union followed suit with .