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Challenges of Creating a Decentralized, Open Source Twitter

Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 1st of May 2022 09:19:55 AM Filed under
Interviews
Web

This is not the first time social media giant Twitter has been besieged by would-be open source competitors. As concerns grow about an undue influence that Elon Musk, who is set to buy the social media giant, might have over the world’s unofficial town square, many are now contemplating jumping to a true open source, peer-to-peer social media network such as Mastadon, or perhaps even starting a new one from scratch.

But standing up a federated, open source equivalent free from corporate influence may be more difficult than one might image.

Open source software developer and advocate Evan Prodromou has been down this path before. A few years after Twitter launched, Prodromou fielded an open source, decidedly non-commercial Twitter-like microblogging service, called StatusNet, which, at least for an audience of technically-inclined open source types, gave Twitter a run for its money. More than 8,000 folks (myself included) signed on within 24 hours of its launch on July 2, 2008, and accumulated more than a million notices by that November.

Over time, StatusNet grew into into a commercial service called Identi.ca, and its code base was eventually rewritten, by way of Node.js, into an activity streams engine that can be used to power internal or public-facing social media services.

We spoke with Prodromou, by email, to learn more about the challenges and potential benefits of creating an open source, decentralized competitor to Twitter. What were the technical, and social challenges to running a social media service, especially an open source federated one? And what can we achieve by establishing web standards in this space?

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