In an unusual move that could expand the reach of its network, Twitter is funding an effort to build an “open and decentralized standard for social media,” that would ultimately make Twitter a client for that standard.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently tweeted the news and acknowledged that the process could take years in the tweet thread that followed.

“This isn’t going to happen overnight. It will take many years to develop a sound, scalable, and usable decentralized standard for social media that paves the path to solving the challenges listed above. Our commitment is to fund this work to that point and beyond,” Dorsey mentioned while sharing a few details on the effort.

The project is called Bluesky and eventually, it should enable Twitter to “access and contribute to a much larger corpus of public conversation,” pushing it to be far more innovative than in the past.

Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s chief technology officer, is responsible for finding a lead for the project.