With the help of Derek Robertson

On Christmas Day, as most of the capital went offline, one of Washington’s most connected senators was playing with a new kind of social media.

with a tweet verifying your identity on the decentralized protocol Nostr, Wyoming Republican Cynthia Lummis joined a holiday season surge of interest in the Web3 social network that also drew the likes of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin.

Alternative social media designs have been percolating for years, with little sign of mass adoption. But over the past year, as interest in cryptocurrency has grown and concerns over Elon Musk’s chaotic takeover of Twitter have grown, an opening has emerged for new types of decentralized social networks, and they are arguably coming in. in 2023 with the wind in favor.

The goals of these networks It could include making censorship more difficult, or making content moderation more agile, or generally lessening the power of giant social media companies to shape and track what people are talking about online.

As with the proliferation of new platforms, choices about alternative network designs tend to be tinged with political considerations.

Trump-era upstarts like Getr, Parler, Gab and Truth Social catered to sections of the right by billing themselves as free-speech alternatives to Twitter. In other words, they still operated as centralized platforms, but offered different policies.

Another crop of alternatives offers different plumbing.

The best known is Mastodon, an open source network founded in 2016 that allows anyone to set up a server. The design is often described as “federated” and may or may not fall along the blurry lines of “Web3”, depending on how you define that term. It allows users to join select communities with custom content moderation rules, and has become a haven in recent weeks for liberal journalists and academics repelled by Twitter’s shift to the right under Musk.

Nostr, which took off in 2020, is a decentralized protocol that allows users to own their identities and verify their posts with digital signatures using public-key and private-key cryptography. The posts are then propagated to a network of interconnected servers. The protocol does not use blockchain, which was found in early experiments to be too slow for social media. But there are structural similarities, and Nostr has found an early niche among the crypto crowd (Lummis is the biggest Bitcoin proponent in Washington) with its libertarian and open source ethos.

Because Nostr users control their own identities, no outside authority can revoke their access to the protocol. And because it’s designed to depend on many independent servers, in theory it should be virtually impossible to ban messages or users from the entire network, even if some servers censor them.

Recently, the biggest promoter of Nostr has been Dorseywho created Twitter’s Bluesky nonprofit initiative to develop a decentralized social networking protocol before leaving to work full-time on a vision of the Internet that he has dubbed “network 5.”

Last month, Dorsey donated around 14 Bitcoin, roughly a quarter of a million dollars, to further its development, and tweeted a screenshot of his phone showing him using a Nostr-based social networking app called… Damus (Get it?).

Influential endorsements aside, Web3’s social projects, which also include Farcaster and Lens, aren’t poised to replace the giant platforms any time soon. They’re still much smaller: while Twitter claims hundreds of millions of active users and Facebook claims billions, Mastodon claimed just 2.5 million users this fall, and Our account only about 220,000 unique user identities.

But replacement isn’t the goal, at least not yet. Because it’s a protocol rather than a platform, Nostr itself isn’t a direct competitor to Twitter, says Koty Auditore, the pseudonymous backer of the project who prompted Dorsey on Twitter to donate to it. And many of the projects face usability roadblocks that are likely to slow down mass adoption. Instead of being given easy-to-remember usernames, Nostr users publish long, crude public keys to establish their identities.

Technologist Chris Messina, a founding member of the Open Web Foundation and an insider on alternative social media, said Mastodon has reached a point where it is “ready for public consumption” while Nostr remains more of an “experiment.”

As Web3 social projects proliferate and public conversations are split across different applications and protocols, there could be political consequences.

Messina is a longtime advocate of decentralizing social media, but still, he says he worries that fragmentation will further strain public discourse that has been characterized in recent years by mutual hostility and misunderstanding.

To mitigate this trend towards balkanization, he would like to see the designers of Web3 prioritize interoperability, agreeing on common technical standards that allow information to flow easily between different platforms, including perhaps those like Twitter that are currently dominant.

Otherwise, “you’ve exacerbated the filter bubble problem,” Messina said. DFD. “I think there will be a decoherence that we are not prepared for.”

As if it were Twitter in its current form wasn’t enough: Elon Musk’s hope of transforming the platform into a WeChat-style “everything app” is well documented, and POLITICO reporters today have a closer look What regulatory hurdles you might face.

Two particular features of the proposed “X” app, as Musk calls it, have especially mind-boggling implications. One is the notion that, like in China, the app could be used as a tool to track personal health and healthcare, something regulators have long been skeptical of in light of strict privacy protections. under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. But crucially: the type of “brain data” collected by proposed brain-computer interfaces like Musk’s Neuralink is not necessarily protected under HIPAA, opening the door for a potential application in the future that could literally read your mind.

Second, there’s the app’s potential crossover with Musk’s Starlink, his global network of satellites that provide the internet. Michael Sayman, a developer who helped create Instagram Stories, told POLITICO’s reporting team that “Using Starlink Internet, Musk could optimize faster and more efficient access to App X services, and potentially speed up access to competing mega-apps. colliding with California net neutrality rules.

It’s a formidable set of challenges and an equally formidable web of interlocking regulations that Musk faces in his next attempt to “disrupt” American technology. — derek robertson

Meta is still defending itself in court against an FTC lawsuit which accuses the company of making an anti-competitive acquisition, but that does not prevent the company from continuing to buy its juniors.

Just before the New Year Goal confirmed to TechCrunch that it was buying Luxexcel, a Dutch smart glasses company. Meta expects the acquisition to boost its development of augmented reality technology, or so-called “smart glasses” as its Ray Ban Stories (unlike the more tote Quest VR headsets).

Whether or not this acquisition triggers the same allegations that faced the Within (the fitness app company the FTC sued), Meta’s continued push to spend in the metaverse even in the midst of a down year comes as no surprise to company observers. in a blog post Last month, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth wrote of the company’s vision for 2023 that, despite regulatory irregularities and a chorus of critics from the metaverse, “what won’t change…is our vision.” and the long-term research effort we’re putting in to get there.” .” — derek robertson