Opinion – Ronaldo Lemos: Platform crisis will create opportunities in 2023

The main innovations of 2022 did not come from big techs or Silicon Valley. On the contrary, the general situation of the big technology companies is one of caution or crisis.

There are many reasons for this. One is precisely the lack of innovation. In the last 12 years there has been no disruptive change in the business model of Silicon Valley’s dominant companies. This model is now beginning to erode. And erosion makes room for possibilities until recently considered impossible to prosper.

Take the case of Twitter. The gossip that has been happening at the company has left skeptical investors, employees, users and advertisers with their hair standing on end. With that, something extraordinary happened. A good deal of attention has been directed towards another platform: Mastodon.

A reasonable number of people in Brazil and other countries are opening an account on this other social network.

Why is it important? Because Mastodon is not even a “platform”. It is a federation of servers and users, self-organizing according to more or less democratic consensus rules.

In other words, unlike Twitter and Silicon Valley companies, Mastodon doesn’t have an owner in the traditional sense. Have many. Anyone can decide to run a server on Mastodon.

I checked, by the way, the number of servers dedicated to the Portuguese language and there are still few. This in itself is an opportunity for Brazilian men and women to launch their projects in the Mastodon federation, starting to control a part of the network that is being formed.

For example, Mastodon does not yet have the retweet function by commenting on the retweeted tweet. Many studies point to this function as responsible for increasing polarization and even misinformation on Twitter. At Mastodon, who decides whether the network will adopt this functionality or not is the set of developers themselves, through decentralized governance processes.

This decentralized model has always been the promise of the internet. For most of the 2000s, decentralization thrived. There was Wikipedia, which showed that it was possible to organize all knowledge collaboratively. There was RSS, created by late friend Aaron Swartz, which allowed users to subscribe to the sites they wanted to follow, controlling their own content feed in an open way. The web was moving towards being more like Mastodon than it is like Twitter (which has become the opposite of the idea of ​​decentralization, being controlled by a playful emperor).

That’s why 2023 can be a year of opportunities. The idea of ​​decentralization, which is at the root of the internet, can be a driving force for innovation and the emergence of new models for virtually any type of application. If it can reinvent an ownerless Twitter, it can do much more.

It can reinvent financial services, federated networks of data relevant to agriculture and other activities central to the country’s economy, federated models of education, connectivity, decentralized urban services such as deliveries, leases and real estate sales, and even a single and decentralized digital identity .

In other words, the platform crisis allows us to dream. And the future is invented first through the dream.

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