Why Decentralize Social Media?

Before DeFi my biggest passion was decentralized social media (DeSo). Building a good social network is one of the worlds trickiest problems and can be done better with decentralization.

What benefits does decentralization bring?

  • You control your account/s

  • An account for each topic

  • User-centric moderation

  • A separate data layer

  • A flourishing app ecosystem

Firstly you control your keys, so nobody can restrict your access because they don't like what you have to say.

Because of this you can create as many accounts as you like. Rather than one account for "Tim", I could have one for Politics, Web3, Family, Food, Games etc. People who care about Web3 can follow that account, foodies can follow the Food account etc. Then when I post I'll know it's something everyone wants to see.

Many people see the above as flaws. If you let everyone create many accounts, and you can't ban anyone, won't the system become flooded with trolls and spam?

This is where user-centric moderation shines. Global moderation doesn't work and will never work, because there is no set of rules every country and culture in the world will agree on.

So why don't we empower users to choose moderation that makes sense to them? Free speech maximalists can see everything, and everyone else can enforce their own rules on their own feed.

Rather than having some blessed global moderators with super powers, you elect your own moderators. Those moderators could be your friends, media companies (NYT, Reuters, etc), companies specializing in moderation (Facebook, Net Nanny) etc.

These moderators can work in the background filtering and curating your feed the way you like it, and you can add or remove them at any time.

The final, most underrated advantage of DeSo is it separates the data layer from the apps. It makes social media more like email, where there are many platforms all talking the same protocol. This stops anyone from being locked into a network they hate because their friends are there. It'll also unleash an ecosystem of apps which can be used with the same data.

I'll be writing more articles on this over the coming week. Don't underestimate how powerful and world changing DeSo could be with only a little more progress.