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How to decentralize social media, according to Wikipedia’s co-founder

What should exist are neutral, technical standards and protocols, like the standards and protocols for blogs, email, and the Web.

As things are, if you want to make short public posts to the greatest number of people, you have to go to Twitter, enriching them and letting them monetize your content . Similarly, if you want to make it easy for friends and family to follow your more personal text and other media, you have to go to Facebook.

After all, the problem about replacing the giant, abusive social media companies is that you cant replace existing technology without making something so much more awesome that everyone will rush to try it.

Well, Ive thought of a way the open source software and blockchain communities might actually kick the legs out from under the social media giants.

Create open data standards and protocols, or probably just adopt the best of already-existing ones , for the feeds of posts that Twitter, Facebook, etc., uses.

Create at least one browser plugins that enable you to select feeds and then display them alongside a users Twitter, Facebook, etc., feeds.

In other words, once this feature were available, you could tell your friends:

In this way, while you might never look at Twitter or Facebook, you can stay in contact with your friends who are still there but on your own terms.

Update: A few sentences have been edited to make it clear the issue isnt that no platforms use an open data standard, its that none of the standards enjoy mass adoption

Original article
Author: Thenextweb

TNW is one of the world’s largest online publications that delivers an international perspective on the latest news about Internet technology, business and culture.

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