Tyler HarperBlaine Cook (@blaine) was Twitter’s first engineer. He wanted it to become a decentralized social network like #Mastodon and he isn’t too upset that Elon Musk is ruining the app he built. I spoke with Cook about what direction social media should take now. https://www.nelsonstar.com/news/nelsons-blaine-cook-helped-build-twitter-and-he-has-a-few-ideas-on-what-should-come-next/
Adam Wright@tylerharper @blaine great share and appreciate you @blaine though I wonder do you feel that the masses want the same experience that you’re referring to? It seems to me curation and our culture of “top lists” is quite validated by user demand.
blaine@Adamwrightstuff @tylerharper I think we'll see those things emerge, no doubt at all in my mind. There will just be a lot more space for stuff that isn't that, too! ☺️
Most people's experience of social media is via local Facebook groups, and I think Mastodon/the Fediverse is ideally situated to make that sort of community much better off.
@blaine @tylerharper for sure. What I wonder is how creative folks will get with building instances designed for their community. Think instances for: universities, news, sports teams, instances with algorithms to curate, etc
@blaine @tylerharper final take here. The sooner someone builds a user-centered instance with those sort of widely popular features (curation, discovery, moderation) the sooner Mastodon becomes a household name. Anyone with the capacity and will to start this let me know! 
@tylerharper ❤️❤️❤️ Thanks, Tyler! Lovely article, and I'm seriously impressed at how much you managed to squeeze in! Such a good, understandable description of it all, too! 😊
Evan Prodromou@tylerharper @blaine wowowowowow, nice article!
cybik 
@tylerharper @blaine so what's your take on Tumblr and Flickr *possibly* implementing ActivityPub (for the record, that's the World Wide Web Consortium's actual standard under Mastodon and a few more federated tools: https://activitypub.rocks/)
@root @tylerharper I'm stoked!
I think that sort of move is going to drive the actually big shift. Twitter's great in many ways and terrible in lots of others, and Mastodon is a mostly-faithful reproduction of that.
The *really* interesting stuff will happen when people can experiment with what "social media" means again.
iamBullivant@tylerharper @blaine "In the intervening years, Cook [Twitter’s founding engineer] continued to preach the promise of decentralized social media. Now, as users leave Twitter to join the alternative social media app Mastodon that features the same concepts Cook once pitched, he says the moment feels “like 14 years of vindication all at once.”
🦋 Ben West 🐒🌻Interesting. Love the idea of #libraries running instances. Perhaps worth reaching out to the folks from the BC Libraries #CoOp to explore further. Not sure if they are in the #fediverse yet.
Paul d'Aoust@BenWest @tylerharper @blaine I love this whole thread -- the local-ness of it (I love Nelson and it's cool that this is coming from a local paper rather than, say, Forbes), and the fact that that I'm crossing paths with Ben again (hi Ben!)
also @blaine I didn't know you work for @fission ; that's cool. Interesting ideas going on there.
Boris Mann@tylerharper @BenWest @blaine paging @sleslie is on the BC Libraries Co-Op team and I’m sure has been thinking about such things.
The #CoSocialCa working group is looking at a national co-op in Canada to potentially support regional and interest based communities.
Scott Leslie@bmann @tylerharper @BenWest @blaine hi y'all, are you thinking of "libraries running mastodon instance for librarians" or "libraries running mastodon instance for patrons"? Both are (frustratingly to me) not simple propositions and have not very much to do with technology. But am interested to hear thoughts. I have member libraries asking for a mastodon instance, but no $ being proposed nor clear use cases so remain...hesitant
@sleslie @tylerharper @BenWest @blaine thanks Scott for the info!
The thought is for patrons.
Although, the "verified staff at a library because using their own instance" is also a thing, rather than hoping "some other platform" doesn't throw you off. Using another instance for accounts and being able to update the library website to add the rel="me" to a staff profile could be interesting.
I know a similar journalist need.
The non-technology reasons would be excellent to hear!
@bmann @tylerharper @BenWest @blaine well the big one is - getting libraries to see their role in providing these kinds of platforms and not just "content." Second would be - getting them to pay to support it if they actually agreed it was in their remit, especially given existing budgets. While not completely monolithic as a field, IMO libraries have been largely resistant to participatory culture and user generated content. I wish it were not so and am happy to be proved wrong
excog"...if a server happens to go down all of its accounts and posts go with it."
Hi,
Is there no way posts are lost? Surely posts can be duplicated on own hardrive?
@excog @tylerharper yup, of course! Also services like the Internet Archive could act as backups. In the current scheme of things, though, they wouldn't be available at the original URLs, so there would be no way to find them (verification that they were real is a separate question).
Whats Up Eh! 
@tylerharper @blaine Good article, exciting to see where this will go. With so much influencing power in social media networks today, we don't want it in the hands of a few untrustworthy characters. I would like to see gov't involved but maybe at arms length, CBC one article mentioned, libraries mentioned here, but the model needs to be sustainable, so funding has to be addressed. I've started using ActivityPub on my website so could post from there on Mastodon and still have a record saved.
@whatsupeh @blaine CBC makes some sense to me as well.
Michal Migurski 🍉@tylerharper @blaine love the hometown paper angle on this 😅