Episode 2: Attack of the Twitter Clones
Episode 2: Attack of the Twitter Clones
Glitch, the sequel
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In this issue:
Stuff that has us like 👀
The real point of Bluesky
1. Five things that have us like 👀
Meta is really going for Twitter’s bread and butter.
Twitter’s latest round of backlash, triggered by the site limiting the number of tweets that users can see per day and announcing plans to charge for TweetDeck, must have Mark Zuckerberg smelling blood in the water. Meta launched its own Twitter clone, called Threads, on Wednesday evening—a day earlier than the New York Times said it would happen. Meta’s network effects obviously put it in a much better position to eat Twitter’s lunch than much smaller challengers like Mastodon and, uh, Bluesky (see below). But Twitter clones by themselves are boring. What will Threads offer that users don’t already have—besides freedom from the Muskiverse?
Has “crypto” lost that lovin’ feeling?
Back in May, venture capital firm Paradigm made crypto folks sad. It announced that it would be expanding its focus beyond crypto, to include “frontier” technologies—including, of course, AI. Then it seemed to twist the knife, removing all mentions of crypto from its website. Paradigm is widely seen as a firm that employs big brains. While those brains had been focused on crypto, crypto folks felt warm and fuzzy. Now it felt like a breakup. But that’s not the case, according to co-founder Matt Huang. “Paradigm has never been more dedicated to crypto,” he tweeted last week. On Saturday he called the removal of “crypto” from the site a mistake, and the firm plastered the word all over its site. That might’ve been a *bit* of an overcorrection, but the episode says something about how fraught the word “crypto” is right now—apparently even for some of the biggest crypto nerds out there.
“Imagine a tiger and a lion talking.”
That’s how former FTX head of partnerships Sina Nader described the conversations that would apparently occur on occasion between Tom Brady (aka TB12) and Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) before it all went to shit. “They’re slightly different, they do different things, but they’re really formidable in their own areas,” he told the NYT. (Pause for laughter.) The word “different” is so overworked in that sentence it might collapse—just like FTX and TB12’s nearly $30 million in stock did last fall (you know you love that burn). The former Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback, who was an FTX “ambassador” and appeared in its ads, has been silent on the topic since the crypto industry went up in flames. But the Times got Nader and a few anons to spill some deets. Besides all the financial and legal blowback from the FTX implosion, TB12’s sports-focused NFT biz, Autograph (which raised $200 million in 2021 and had SBF on its board), has apparently seen its own turmoil. It all must be so … deflating.
Vitalik and the Taproot Wizards
The Taproot Wizards, the Bitcoin NFT project spearheaded by Udi Wertheimer and Eric Wall, today hosted the great Vitalik Buterin himself in a Twitter Space. If you don’t get the whole Wizard thing, don’t worry, there are many layers (they actually dress up in wizard costumes and it’s kind of adorable?), and even the well-versed will struggle to untangle the trolling and performance art from the genuine argument. Udi says he is “making Bitcoin magical again.” But suffice it to say that he and Wall (who calls himself a “troll-demon”) are trying to challenge the culture around Bitcoin, which they feel is too set in its ways. And if you’ve followed one or both of these Wizards on Twitter for any length of time, you know that neither is afraid to push it. The theme of today’s session with Buterin was called “What can Bitcoiners learn from Ethereum?”
The MLB All-Star festivities will feature a “virtual ballpark” for 15,000 fans.
One of the obvious big prizes for virtual reality is live sports. One big problem with that dream, however, is that recreating the experience of being amidst thousands of fellow fans is a technically challenging data problem. Improbable, a company that specializes in virtual worlds, is determined to fix that. Its technology, called the M2 network (more on this in the next edition of Glitch), will be on display this weekend as the Major League Baseball All-Star Game takes place in Seattle. It will power a “virtual ballpark” that will host a watch party for the annual All-Star Celebrity Softball Game, for up to 15,000 attendees. A large screen inside a digital stadium will show the game. It’s not virtual live sports, exactly, but attendees will be able to speak with whomever they encounter and hear whatever conversations are happening around them. Baby steps.
2. How Bluesky could be more than just a Twitter clone
It’s been happening again this week. My Twitter timeline is flooded with declarations that the bird site is dying—this time for real!—at the hands of Elon Musk (He’s really going to charge for TweetDeck? 😭).
These posts commonly contain a second part: “Find me on Bluesky.”
In these uncertain times, people lamenting Twitter’s decline and swearing fealty to a clone site isn’t anything new. But it’s ironic that Bluesky seems to be particularly popular, and not just because it was hatched as an internal Twitter project a few years ago.
Way back when “Web 2.0” was the new new thing, Twitter was the poster child. It was revolutionary in the way it helped people connect with others and keep track of the world in real-time. It is hard to put into words what Twitter was in its heyday, but the commonly tweeted refrain that “I can’t believe this website is free” almost gets there.
That heyday is long gone—and it was gone well before the Tesla man took over. But no matter how badly you may want to leave for greener pastures (or, wait for it … bluer skies), it’s not so easy. Whatever value there is in the network and/or brand you built on the bird site, if you leave, you will be leaving it behind and starting over. Sure, some folks may follow you, but there is no way to transplant your Twitter self into a new platform. To be fair, that’s not just Twitter: Web 2.0 tends to do you like that.
Back to the irony of Bluesky, which is now independent of Twitter: a primary goal of its creators is to solve this exact problem.
Bluesky’s essence is not the Twitter clone all the cool kids have been talking about (and which more than 100,000 people had signed up for as of early June, with a wait list said to be in the millions). It’s the underlying “Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol.”
The open-source software lets otherwise unrelated servers share data via a set of standards that comprise a “federated” network of social media platforms and applications. The model is similar to that underlying Mastodon, another would-be Twitter usurper, which runs on a protocol called ActivityPub. But the creators of the AT Protocol say their protocol will give users more freedom and power.
First and foremost, users will have the power to up and leave a platform if they’ve had enough of it, because they will be able to seamlessly take their network and content to a different one running the AT Protocol.
A “base layer of portability”
Right now the only app running the protocol is Bluesky, which the company is developing in a private beta phase. Eventually it will be possible for others to create new platforms, using their own servers. These future upstarts will be free to experiment with new algorithms for displaying content, content moderation approaches, and overall user experiences. Maybe one day everyone will leave Bluesky for an alternative running the same protocol. That, its creators say, is the point.
In a conference talk she gave in May, BlueSky CEO Jay Graber said one of the initial priorities for her team has been “making sure that the stuff we choose to build is going to be built on a very strong base layer of portability.”
The first way ATProtocol does this is by using a novel approach to online identity called decentralized identifiers (DIDs), in which users employ cryptographic keys to prove they are who they say they are. DIDs open the door for users to control their own identity credentials rather than relying on centralized platform providers to manage that information.
Right now, Bluesky’s servers are managing users’ cryptographic keys, Graber said in May, because “we weren’t super confident we could create a smooth user experience for that.” She added that letting people manage their own keys is “something that we’ll definitely pursue in the future.”
The second thing the protocol uses to make accounts portable is the InterPlanetary Linked Data (IPLD) system.
IPLD was developed by Protocol Labs, the startup behind the Interplanetary File System (IPFS), a set of protocols for organizing and transferring data using a peer-to-peer network, rather than depending on Amazon or some other cloud provider. Protocol Labs also developed Filecoin, a cryptocurrency system for paying users to store data and make it available persistently, as a cloud provider would.
IPLD is what IPFS uses to describe data in a standard way so that it can be uploaded, stored, and linked together using a peer-to-peer network. But it has applications outside of IPFS—and that’s the whole point, says Rod Vagg, a software engineer and researcher at Protocol Labs. “The Bluesky use case is exactly why IPLD exists.” The protocol allows open protocols that use cryptographic hash functions to “spread like a web,” Vagg says.
A cryptographic hash function is a tool that takes data of any size and transforms it into a small, fixed-length string of bits, called a hash, that can be represented by a series of numbers. Hash functions are supposed to make it next to impossible to produce the same hash for two different pieces of data. In other words, a hash from an established and trusted function is like a fingerprint.
Both IPFS and the AT Protocol use this property of hashes to achieve what is known as “content addressing.”
To locate a piece of content on IPFS, a computer running the protocol needs the file’s hash. It can then ask other computers on the network if they have the file associated with that fingerprint. This lets network users store and retrieve data from many different places, as opposed to relying on one server. Hashes, which refer to the content itself, take the place of uniform resource locators (URLs) in the traditional web’s content location system.
The AT Protocol uses content addressing, and specifically IPLD, to help make user data portable. A user’s data is contained in a “repository” that is represented to the network as a hash. Every change to the data is cryptographically signed so that it can be verified by others in the network.
DIDs and hash-based content addressing will make it easy to unplug from one platform and plug back into another without missing a beat, according to Graber, who explained that this will keep “traditional service providers” in the network accountable to users. It also paves the way for AT Protocol apps to integrate with IPFS.
Graber has gone out of her way to make clear that Bluesky doesn’t use a blockchain. But Vagg says the protocol “does some blockchainy stuff, fundamentally.”
Blockchain or not, the trust arrangement is the same. When we use Twitter, for better or worse we entrust our identity and data to the company’s servers. Though there will be centralized servers running AT Protocol apps, users won’t necessarily have to trust them to manage that information. Instead, they can choose to trust the cryptography, as they would in a blockchain system. Whatever you call it, that’s a different model than Web 2.0.
The question is whether that will lead to anything novel for the typical social media user. Until then, Bluesky is just another buzzy Twitter clone. —Mike Orcutt
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