Thread by @rabble

Twitter is important, but it's always been vulnerable as a company. When Twitter does something which upsets the community of users, it is often due to this vulnerability. Let me tell you a little known story about an earlier time a billionaire tried a hostile takeover of twitter

Back in 2015 Bill Gross at Idealab tried to take over twitter. He did it by creating a billion dollar fund to buy up twitter clients. If he got enough clients, he could make them post to his own twitter like microblogging site in addition to twitter.

Eventually he could cut off posting to twitter and only have people use his new site. If you get the celebs and popular tweeters then everybody else would follow.

And he was actively buying up clients. Eventually he got to buying TweetDeck, and the creators of TweetDeck told twitter and decided to get bought by the mother company instead.

That's why twitter bought TweetDeck and then didn't do anything with it. The whole point was to take TweetDeck away from Bill Gross, prevent it from being used as a weapon against twitter.

Until 2015 all the innovation on twitter came from the users and developers. It was a powerful model. Under @dickc the board decided to take a poison pill to prevent any take over of the platform by third parties.

They limited third party clients to 100k registered users. They said you could have more, but the reality is they never approved apps for viewing / posting tweets as a full client with more. Furthermore, they weren't honest or open about the process, it upset a lot of people.

After that, twitter stagnated. There was no space for third party developers and users to innovate on the platform. The company employees weren't told that twitter's magic was adopting the innovative practices of the users. Only once @jack came back on board did that get fixed.

Twitter was nearly captured by wealth interests. The company was never structured to prevent a takeover the way Snap, Facebook, Instagram, and others were with super voting shares held by founders.

The company has always been more important to its users and society than it has been a cash cow. Today it's profitable, but that's almost an accident. Twitter is a 'public good' sustained by a private company with stock that anybody can buy.

Twitter thought the open ecosystem was going to be captured, so they shut down the ecosystem to save the company. I wish they'd partnered with app developers, be honest about the attack on the company, and made partners out of developers. But i'd long since left by then.

Twitter is important. It matters, and we care about it in ways that are very different from most companies, or even most tech platforms.

When @jack came back on board, he got the dev and product organizations sorted to be able to launch things again. He also worked with @paraga to create a model to how to prevent a takeover again. By opening up and becoming the utility protocol @jack always dreamed about.

Early on, @ev planned on flipping @Twitter, but he didn't want to go along with the sale, so @jack was made CEO because he was the developer on the team who seemed like the best fit. @jack has grown in to being an incredible entrepreneur, but at the time he was just a brilliant

programmer with a radical vision for the future. He advocated for Twitter being a public utility, the pipes of the social online. We didn't have the term social media at the time. This model scared away companies from acquiring twitter, but it did shape twitter.

The open easy to use RESTful api, and even federated twitter that @blaine built and @fredwilson signed off on trying as an experiment, twitter as protocol. That experiment failed, because it was built in XMPP and because the tech didn't scale at the time.

Scaling twitter became the priority. We did get oAuth and ActivityPub out of those early hackathons at @OReillyMedia organized foocamps. The open api meant that a federated twitter wasn't needed, until the api got closed, of course.

Now, years later, @jack becomes CEO again. He fixed the product and engineering orgs, so they can ship again. And then started advocating for the open utility model. Playing off ideas which were circulating within both crypto and the decentralized web community ( @GETDWeb ), he

launched the idea of @bluesky as a way of restoring the dream of revolution which twitter originally promised. Becoming something more than a single company. A
multistakeholder public space which isn't owned by a single company.

This work on building a decentralized open alternative isn't done. People complain that the work isn't happening fast enough. Ironic given they also complain that the current social media platforms were built too quickly without thinking through the consequences of our actions.

I think the community of people building alternatives are the best defense against a hostile takeover. That's why I've been working to help @arcalinea and @bluesky. It's also why I've built my own open source, decentralized social media app, @planetaryinc.

You can participate. Fund or work on the fediverse, work on the decentralized web, come to the dweb camp in August, donate to projects like secure scuttlebutt. opencollective.com/secure-scuttle…

The public sphere won't exist without people who fight to defend it. Our digital spaces need to be supported and defended. What we have is a commons, where nobody should be able to own it. Twitter has been an amazing steward of the twittersphere, but they can't do it alone.

What does this new space need to survive? It's a digital commons. We can look to Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom's 8 principles of a well managed commons:

1. Commons need to have clearly defined boundaries.

2. Rules should fit local circumstances.

3. Participatory decision-making is vital.

4. Commons must be monitored.

5. Sanctions for those who abuse the commons should be graduated.

6. Conflict resolution should be easily accessible.

7. Commons need the right to organise.

8. Commons work best when nested within larger networks.

Source: earthbound.report/2018/01/15/eli…