CEO of Twitter, Jack Patrick Dorsey, speaks during an exclusive interview with Hindustan Times at Twitter India office, at the Crescent, on November 14, 2018 in New Delhi, India.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced Tuesday the company is funding a new research team that will develop an "open and decentralized standard for social media," in part to address some of the current problems with the platform.

The idealistic long-term vision is to make disparate social media networks more like email, so that users could join different networks but still communicate with each other no matter which one they're using.

Shared technical standards would also make it easier for users to gain some control over how these networks recommend content, which could reduce the tendency to guide users to the most outrageous material and users in hopes of keeping them engaged, according to Dorsey. It could also make it easier for the social networks to enforce restrictions against hate speech and other abuse, essentially helping them share the load at a lower cost.

There are already social media platforms that operate on a decentralized framework, the most popular of which is Mastodon, an open-source social network that's often used as an alternative to Twitter. Tim Berners-Lee, the founder of the World Wide Web, has also launched several projects advocating for a decentralized internet.

But unlike these projects, which have struggled to gain traction, Twitter already has a devoted user base of more than 300 million people, which could give Dorsey more traction in trying to push the standard through and convince other social networks to lend support.

It seems unlikely, however, that Facebook, which currently dominates the space with an audience of more than 2 billion users, would be willing to cede control to an external coalition. A Facebook spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.