No one owns the internet. There’s no one stopping you from posting videos to your own web server, at least so long as you have the technical chops to set one up and the money to pay for hosting. But you’re at a disadvantage if you’re posting your video outside of YouTube or Facebook. And if Facebook or Twitter ban you from sharing it, will anyone ever find it?

But allowing everyone to post anything they want to these platforms isn’t a great idea either. The power and responsibility to handle issues from harassment to hate speech to revenge porn to foreign propaganda is concentrated in the hands of just a few companies.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey says he wants to change that. Twitter will pay five people to develop standards for “decentralized” social networks, Dorsey tweeted Wednesday. Eventually, Dorsey said, he hopes Twitter itself uses whatever the team comes up with to make itself less centralized.

That could mean that, instead of Twitter the company having sole control over Twitter the social network, many other people could run their own versions of Twitter, in the same way that many different companies, nonprofits, and individuals run email services. You can send an email from Gmail to Yahoo, or to a server run by a mom-and-pop email provider. You can even set up your own email server at home. That’s because email is based on open standards that anyone can use.

But don’t expect to set up your own Twitter tomorrow. The project is in its earliest stages. Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal is hiring the team, which will be known as "@bluesky." It's not clear yet what form the new project will take. "We’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch," Dorsey wrote. "That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide."

It’s also not clear how, if at all, the company would make money from a decentralized version of its social network. "Why is this good for Twitter?" Dorsey wrote. "It will allow us to access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms which promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be far more innovative than in the past."

Dorsey's tweets hint that Twitter sees decentralization as a way to handle content moderation. He cites a paper by Mike Masnick, editor of the tech publication Techdirt, as one of the motivations for exploring decentralization.