Few words can adequately capture the events that have occurred in the six weeks following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of Twitter. Mass layoffs, ultimatums, U-turns, resignations, advertising showdowns, crowdsourced ban-reversals, picking battles with Apple, and a revised cryptographic signature, Twitter stock future predictions that has everyone and their uncle baffled come very close to qualifying as “chaotic” or “farcical,” though.
In reality, anyone who paid attention to the grandstanding and flip-flopping that surrounded the six months leading up to the acquisition would have predicted most of this. However, stepping back from the chaos already established at Twitter Towers, it’s worthwhile to examine a repeating theme that has pervaded the tale ever since businessman Musk entered the scene – one that could play a crucial role in determining the future of Twitter.
Twitter Stock Future Predictions with the Open-Source Component
So, what is open source software? Musk explicitly advocated for the open source software of Twitter’s recommendation system even before acquiring a 9.2% interest in the company in April. Musk reiterated this point in his inaugural speech after Twitter approved his offer to buy the company fully, claiming that he wanted to make Twitter better than before, which includes making the algorithms open source to promote confidence.
The idea’s underlying theory is a good enough one. Understanding the algorithms behind Twitter’s display of certain content to users, and consequently the broader impact this is having on society, could be facilitated by having access to these algorithms.
However, according to most estimates, such a method is flawed because looking at the code doesn’t reveal how the algorithm was developed, what individual biases were engaged in its design, or what data it was based on.
Since stepping over, Musk has yet to say much about publicly disclosing Twitter’s algorithm. Still, he’s fired the whole “ethical AI” team attempting to address the issue he had previously identified: increasing algorithmic visibility.
In reality, after criticism over apparent racial prejudice in its image-cropping technology, Twitter has already pledged to open-sourcing at least one of its algorithms. That never happened, but given that Twitter’s ML Ethics, Transparency and Accounting (META) team is currently inactive, it might take some time before something akin materializes there.
But the open source component is still there in various forms throughout the Twitter universe.
The Substitute for Twitter
While Mastodon isn’t the Twitter 2.0 that most of the world wants, it is a glimpse of potential Twitter stock future predictions. Mastodon has become the go-to lifeboat for people jumping ship from Twitter. The so-called “open source Twitter alternative” has microblogging features similar to those of Twitter. Still, it is built on a fediverse, decentralized network of connected servers that enables communication between multiple platforms and is driven by the open ActivityPub protocol.
Although Mastodon recently surpassed 1 million and then 2 million unique visitors, it isn’t the only network that stands to gain from the Twitter scandal. The CEO of Tumblr’s parent organization, Automatic, Matt Mullenweg, stated that Tumblr downloads had increased dramatically in the weeks after Musk joined Twitter. Tumblr was already presenting itself as a “better Twitter.”
Sensor Tower data demonstrates this, with a 96% increase in Tumblr app installs in the United States.
Mullenweg has moved quickly to connect Tumblr with the open source video editing software, confirming previously discussed ambitions to make Tumblr “open source as feasible.” He also asked for feedback on plans to align Tumblr with the fediverse and support-related open source protocols before disclosing that Tumblr expects to implement the ActivityPub protocol in the future. This could result from the ability to communicate directly between Mastodon and Tumblr users. Don MacAskill, the CEO of Flickr, later asked his Twitter followers if they thought the networking and photo-hosting site should also adopt ActivityPub.
In another instance, open source enterprise communication system Rocket. Chat announced earlier this year that it was switching to Matrix, a comparable decentralized communication protocol.
It is evident that there is increasing momentum in the social domain to shift away from centralization and toward an interconnected world where single-player ecosystems do not constrain people.
The Bluesky Theory
This is one course of action Twitter might take. Based on a person intimately associated with the project, the corporation toyed with a similar decentralized strategy in its early years, and the idea has just come up again.
One of Twitter’s original programmers, Blaine Cook, who joined the company only a few months after it was founded, has expressed regret that Twitter might have been a decentralized protocol from the start. He said he had begun working on it while serving as the developing social network’s principal architect, but the initiative was eventually abandoned soon after he departed the organization in 2008.
The early attempts can be linked to ActivityPub’s ancestry because the decentralized API was highly similar to the current version of ActivityPub.
What became this Twitter fediverse idea, then? We’ve never heard the whole story, Cook claimed, adding that the API was never implemented because he was “pushed out of the firm” after being outvoted on the issue.
But if we fast-forward to 2022, there is still a chance that Twitter will adopt confederation and an open-source protocol.
Difficulties
Since federated systems provide consumers with more choices and make it harder for businesses to lock them in, this is likely one of the main arguments against a decentralized social network. If a person can download an app from one firm and talk with friends who use a different app, the so-called “network effect,” where a product’s value improves as the number of users rises, isn’t nearly as strong.
According to Cook, everyone wants to be with their friends; thus, network effects have kept users on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram since those networks’ creation. The diversity flips the script on control by allowing users to choose where their online identities are hosted. In the end, it’s hoped that this will also lead to competition between social media platforms like Mastodon and others and the expansion of functionality in a way that Twitter could never accommodate.
Prescriptive Time
Numerous anti-trust litigation has already resulted in some significant change, such as the requirement that Apple permit alternative payment methods for Dutch dating app creators and the increased regulation that Google experienced to become more open.
This is an example of how Big Tech is being coerced into releasing its hold on various platforms. These businesses have been working together to take more proactive steps to appease authorities.
The Data Transfer Project, an open-source endeavor to develop tools for transferring data between services, was founded in 2018 by Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Although only a little has resulted from this endeavor thus far, there have been a few noteworthy developments. For instance, Facebook introduced a service that enables users to move photographs and videos to Google Photos. This year, Google devoted $3 million to portability initiatives.
Open Barrier
All of this brings us to an intriguing conjecture: What if Twitter embraced open source fully? Not just a protocol or a personalized recommendation, but the entire game codebase, clients, and all? It would undoubtedly be a Herculean task, especially given all others on Twitter at the moment.
To avoid the inherent limitations of a single product team at Twitter or Facebook, all the companies on a standard protocol might share blocklists and recognition models rather than relying on a single organization to handle bots or abuse.
There are indications that Musk is attempting to draw on other elements of the open-source community with his ideas for Twitter 2.0, including a protocol that billions of people utilize.
Twitter 2.0
Nobody, possibly not even Musk himself, truly knows what course Twitter will follow as it stands at a significant crossroads.
From an ecological impact, Twitter may be too large to fail in specific ways as the required international town square, but it may only sometimes be a successful business. In a world of lax regulation, marketers are hesitant to associate themselves with hateful speech and other dubious content. Twitter will likely need more subscribers to compensate for its lost advertising money.
Twitter stock future predictions are challenging to envision Twitter as a company moving forward in its current state. It will need to change significantly, which might call for drastic actions other than attempting to increase its subscriber base. The social networking industry is about to undergo a big transition due to growing interest in and advances toward the fediverse and increasing regulatory pressure over compatibility and algorithmic transparency.
