Marketplace Morning Reports new Skin in the Game series explores what we can learn about

money and careers from the $300 billion video game industry. Plus, here how an Oakland-based

program helps young people get the skills they need to break into this booming industry.

Listen to Skin in the Game and more from the Marketplace Morning Report wherever you get your

podcasts. When the most dominant social media company says it'll give users more control,

we've got questions. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Karino.

It's been just a few weeks since the new Threads app burst onto the scene threatening to be the

ultimate Twitter Killer or platform formerly known as Twitter Killer. But it's not just an alternative

to the former bird app Threads has promised, but an alternative model of social media, one that is

decentralized and interoperable. So how is this model different than the classic flavor most of us

are used to? We asked Arvin Narayan and a professor of computer science at Princeton.

In regular social media or traditional social media, there is one app made by one company and

every user interacts through that app and all of that data goes to that company's servers.

Decentralized social media can be set up in a few different ways. So one possible way, and I'll

mention how, let's say, Macedon works. That's a one decentralized social media system.

What happens there is there's a group of developers that make the app Macedon, but it's not

one single company and it's open-source software. Anybody can download and set up their own

Macedon server. And everybody who is using the Macedon software, even if it's on different servers,

run by different companies, will all be able to talk to each other. They're essentially on the

same network. Where did this idea sort of come from? Like, what was it in reaction to what are the

intended benefits? The idea of decentralization has always been around. The internet, back when it

was designed, you know, in the 60s and 70s, was designed with a vision that's very different from

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