Decentralized Social Networks
The widespread use of social media has drastically changed the way we communicate, but many believe these changes aren’t all positive.
The lack of content moderation has allowed misinformation to spread across social platforms. Censorship, privacy, political neutrality, user control, and malicious activity are some of the challenges many social media platforms face.
These challenges have a negative impact on users and the dissatisfaction sparked an emerging trend: decentralized social networks, also known as federated networks.
What is a Decentralized Social Network?
Decentralized social networks are social media platforms built on blockchain technology. Unlike centralized platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, activities on these networks are irreversibly recorded on a decentralized protocol that no central authority can control or oversee.
Centralized social platforms prioritize shareholder profits and advertiser interests over consumer protection and security, they also control what users see or post.
On the other hand, users have more control and autonomy in decentralized social networks. An individual can create their social network and decide how it works and what users can say. Rather than having content monitored by a body, the developer of a decentralized social network can define the site’s acceptable behaviour.
Decentralized social media platforms prevent the unauthorised sale of user data, which is one of the contentious issues with centralized social networks. Blockchain technology improves user privacy and data security by utilizing cryptography methods.
Examples of Decentralized Social Networks
- Audius: This is a Solana-based decentralized audio streaming platform that aims to give everyone the freedom to distribute, monetize, and stream any audio content. Fans can listen to original compositions and mixes, curate libraries, and repost, follow, like, and share content, while artists can easily upload musical clips to the platform.
It provides the same amount of entertainment without a mediator who throws irrelevant ads in listeners’ way and then takes a hefty cut from content creators.
- Entre: Entre, the shortened form for entrepreneur, is a blockchain-powered Web3 application. Professionals can post Twitter-like content and conduct business transactions on Entre. They can hold meetings, host virtual events, and hire employees, with the app acting as a decentralized, digitally monetizable alternative to LinkedIn, Zoom, and Google Calendar, all rolled into one.
- Veranos: This is a decentralized digital marketing platform currently being built by Digiscript. It aims to establish a smart contract between crypto influencers and brands. The platform eradicates settlement issues and makes transactions seamless between them. You can find them on Twitter @veranosio
- Lens Protocol: This Aave-backed app is deployed on Polygon. When a user on the protocol creates a profile, that profile is tokenized as an NFT. When someone follows a profile, they establish an on-chain relationship that cannot be broken arbitrarily by the platform or anyone else, because those relationships are tokenized as NFTs that can be viewed in a digital wallet like MetaMask or on the web on OpenSea.
The advantages and disadvantages of Decentralized Social Networks
- A decentralized social network gives users more control and fosters independence without a central authority. The advantages include resistance to censorship, ownership of personal data, and improved control over user-generated content. This means that no one can change or remove user-generated content.
The disadvantage of this is that hate groups can create their social media sites. Individuals can block these groups, but they cannot stop them from using the network.
- Many people who use decentralized social networks value economic neutrality. They want to be free of intrusive advertising and the risks it poses to their privacy. Federated networks are looking for new ways to monetize to stay afloat. They often use digital currencies, such as Ethereum, to keep operations running.
- One of the key features of the decentralized social media ecosystem is equitable monetization for community members and content creators. When compared to unbalanced monetization schemes in traditional social media, decentralized social earning has the potential to be a game-changer for content creators and attract universal adoption efforts.
- Users can create accounts on decentralized social networks without linking them to real-world identities such as email addresses or phone numbers. Rather than relying on a single organization to protect user data, these networks frequently use public-key cryptography for account security.
While this is advantageous from a data security outlook, it also presents some challenges.
Due to a lack of funds, decentralized networks may shut down, causing users to lose their data and connections. Federated networks do not keep records of personal data on servers, therefore, users have no easy way to reconnect with others on the network in this case.
Decentralized social media has the potential to shift the balance of equity and privacy in favor of users and content creators. It has the potential to reshape the social media industry and usher in a new era of digital free speech in the Web3 era.
We are Building Veranos to allow anyone to be rewarded for their influence. We are also making marketing campaigns permissionless with smart contracts.
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