TEA Talks: Twitter’s “decentralized” Bluesky vs the TEA Party TApp
Twitter released their own decentralized version of Twitter called Bluesky. The Bluesky app is open-source separates posting and who sees each post through a “speech and reach” model that encompasses content moderation.
In our latest TEA Talk, Kevin compares this to the TEA Project’s TEA Party TApp and dives into some deeply philosophical differences. Kevin touches on one of the most salient principles of Web3, that the user owns their private data. Out of the hands of corporations and centralized servers, users can choose to do what they want with their own data and businesses will need to find different business models than the advertising-based ones that have been prevalent so far in Web 2.0.
A key aspect of Bluesky is through a decentralized moderation model. That implies that there will be some “elected officials” who decide what others can see. Anyone who’s ever spent time on Reddit or similar internet forums know the power that moderators hold. Moderators are supposedly proxies for accepted norms, but these are ultimately humans who have their own personality quirks that end up in their moderation choices.
At the TEA Project, we’re on the side of fully empowering the user to decide what they want to see and participate with as far as social networking. This philosophy is embedded in the first TApp we designed for the platform, TEA Party.
Here’s Kevin discussing the fundamental design differences between a truly decentralized Web3 dApp and something like Twitter’s Bluesky offshoot:
