Twitter may succeed in building a decentralised standard for social media but probably won’t

If you need to read one thing about Twitter’s plan to build a “decentralised standard for social media,” make it MG Siegler’s Twitter the Genie, Bluesky the Bottle:¹

I just think it’s important to be realistic here. Both because it behooves no one to get all excited about something that is never going to happen. And especially because it’s Twitter. Quite frankly, the service — which I love dearly — lost the right to promise such things years ago.

Bingo. This whole thing looks a lot like a weird, empty PR move for Twitter, an attempt to be cool again among the other cool kids. Siegler adds:

Honestly, as a Twitter shareholder, I’m more than a little worried about this. Not because it seems like a destruction of value, but more so because it seems like another huge distraction. And again, one that seems very unlikely to succeed. And even if it did, to solve much of anything?

This is going to solve the toxicity of the internet? Come on.

Now replace the word ‘distraction’ by the word ‘diversion,’ and to me this sentence still holds up pretty well. Twitter is trying to sell itself as the good guy while the world is — rightfully — pointing fingers at Facebook: I don’t think anyone is buying it.