Social media is increasingly becoming the main source of information for people all around the world. It influences the thoughts we have as well as the things we like and dislike — trends, opinions, markets and politics.

The most influential social media networks today were created decades ago with the sole purpose of maximizing profit. But times have changed, social media has evolved from apps only being used for entertainment and keeping in touch with friends to powerful mediums for news, information, and trends reaching billions of people worldwide. And with that shift, I believe social media networks should be treated more as public goods than purely commercial products.

Because these networks are centralized, a small group of people hold significant control over users' data, giving them an unbelievable amount of power. It enables network operators to influence and shape public opinion by hiding content that goes against their interests and designing algorithms that promote specific agendas.

Building the next generation of social apps on decentralized social networks puts the power back into the hands of the user.

Decentralized social networks give users complete ownership of their digital identity and data. Your profile, content, followers, and all interactions truly belong to you — no single platform or company can remove or restrict your access to them.

It also means that you can take your profile and data across platforms. Imagine having the same followers on all major social media platforms; Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Substack. You never have to convince your followers to support you on another platform, they're just automatically there already. That's what a future built on decentralized social looks like.

The reality is that user-ownership, composability and all the other benefits of decentralized social are not enough to convert the masses. They provide great opportunities for creators and users, but 99% of people will not move to a platform with less content and less sophisticated algorithms just because it's decentralized.

Instead, I believe we need to focus less on making the Web3 features attractive, and more on simply building high-quality consumer apps that can outcompete their Web2 competitors.

With this approach, users new to decentralization naturally experience its perks firsthand — gradually making the technology feel like the norm for new applications.

The technology behind all this is complicated, so trying to onboard someone by explaining it to them is an uphill battle. When blockchain technology reaches global adoption, most people will not be able to explain how it works — most people today don't know how HTTP or an API works, but they still use it every day.

For decentralized social to actually win, we need to build truly unique social experiences that go viral. This is not achieved by replicating existing platforms like Twitter, Instagram or TikTok — success will come from novel experiences that users can not get anywhere else.

One historical example of a novel experience in social is BeReal. While it used photos just like existing platforms, it completely changed the paradigm by focusing on authentic, spontaneous moments rather than staged, curated content by prompting all users to take a photo from their front and back-camera once a day within a 2-minute window. It was a fresh approach to social media, and it took off in a major way, reaching 73.5M monthly active users in August 2022.

Now imagine if BeReal had taken a different approach to building their app. Instead of building and maintaining their own server infrastructure, which likely cost millions, the founders could have built on a decentralized social network and benefited from streamlined development and massive cost savings by using existing decentralized infrastructure.

It's a win-win: founders get easier development, lower costs, and launch with an existing user base, solving the cold start problem, while decentralized social gets the killer apps it needs for mainstream adoption — bringing us closer to a future where users truly own their digital identity.