I’ve never been a fan of Twitter (sorry, “X”), but seeing what it has become today I must admit that such a service now seems indispensable. The single fact that it has become the number one channel of communication for most political personalities makes it difficult to imagine a world without such a tool.

Until Elon, I didn’t really have a point of view on how the platform was managed, which I guess means that it was more or less ok. Technically speaking the service was reliable. From a moderation standpoint I’m sure I missed a lot of things, but the only decision they made that I remember as creating a lot of discussion was the ban of Donald Trump, which I personally consider understandable.

With the takeover by Elon it just became really clear to me how much it’s not ok to have a private company managing a service of such importance. The guy is filthy rich but has still one obsession: make the service profitable by any means. He’s destroying the whole thing in front of us but well, he owns it, what can we do?

My take is that a social media used for critical information at the scale of Twitter should be managed by a non-profit organization whose goal is to create, scale and maintain the platform from a technical standpoint, but also to moderate its content by creating a committee composed by people from around the world, representative of all the users of the service, who would be entitled to edict its rules. Moreover the whole thing shouldn’t be spoiled by ads, it should run on donations, like Wikipedia. We’re talking of a global public service, let’s ask the governments and companies that use it to give some cash for it, they have plenty.

At this point a lot of you must just wonder if I know Mastodon, isn’t it exactly what I’m talking about? Well, I love the project, truly, but I don’t think that it will ever replace Twitter for two reasons: it’s more complex to use than Twitter, and being decentralized it will never have a global moderation that really works. I will not even talk about the private alternatives to Twitter that exist today (yes, including Threads) as they are precisely private, and therefore necessarily inadequate in my opinion.

I’m the CTO of a Swiss company that develops software. We do a lot of complex web and mobile applications, and even if I have never worked on a project of the scale of Twitter I think that I have a pretty good idea of what it would require. My idea is that we could try to crowdfund the project with the goal of having a first version of the platform running by mid 2024. If my help is welcome I could take the technical lead for a while. I could also find an arrangement with my company to provide qualified resources at a reasonable price before the organization is able to recruit its own team.

I know that sounds crazy (or dumb), but I think that we really have an issue and we should address it.

What are your thoughts?