The rise of Decentralized Social Sites

By now everyone is aware of the outage that Facebook and all its platforms suffered on Monday October 5th. This happened in the midst of a deep and well deserved investigation that the company has been under. The investigation has only intensified after Frances Haugen, the FB whistleblower, testified before congress the day after the outage.

"I am here today because I believe that Facebook's products harm children, stoke division, and weaken our democracy," she said during her opening remarks. "The company's leadership knows how to make Facebook and Instagram safer but won't make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They won't solve this crisis without your help." -Frances Haugen-

A few weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg and his team were banned from releasing “Instagram Kids,” an instagram like app for kids 13 and under, due to the psychological harm that social media sites cause to teens and young adults. The company seems to either be naive about the harmful effects of their sites or completely disregard human life. The company released the following statement.

We believe building “Instagram Kids” is the right thing to do, but we're pausing the work.
We’ll use this time to work with parents, experts and policymakers to demonstrate the value and need for this product.
We’ll continue to build opt-in parental supervision tools for teens.

The hypocrisy of Social media companies has reached a level of disgust, specially after many silicon valley ex-executives have confirmed that they do not let their kids use social media sites and limit their screen time (the social dilemma).

Many tech companies are looking the other way and misleading the public by claiming that their products are great community and social tools that are inclusive, open, and foment unity. The underline message here is: “Profits over people at all cost.”

I believe that their time is up, and thanks to the explosive growth of blockchain technology, decentralized applications and cryptocurrencies, people are looking for safer, more reliable, less intrusive ways to connect with their loved ones and the world. Besides the predatory practices of these centralized social sites, they also monetize our content and data and selling it back to us in the form of Ads. This abuse has to stop.

Decentralized applications like bitclout, Minds, Diaspora, karma, Steem, Mirror and others (see directory below) are server-less or run on independently owned distributed servers which allows for more independence, security, and self-governance. They fosters transparency as the data can be viewed in near real time by anyone on the network and they do not take our data hostage.

Some have NFTs features that allow members to monetize their content and the consensus can be programmed to compensate miners and validators who keep the platform running.

There will be challenges that may slow down the growth of these web3 Dapps. They many never see the same engagement we see on regulars social sites as most of the web dapps (decentralized applications) serve specific purposes and needs, unlike the one-size-fits-all approach of FaceBook and its counterparts. Also, these behemoths will not go without a fight. They are already building products for the metaverse in an attempt to compete with the newcomers in that realm, and they will not stop here.

Decentralized protocols lack marketing and funding, they rely on world of mouth alone to spread the benefit of their services. As of now, their funds come from ICOs, private investors (which adds centralization), and token creation and sales which puts a stress on how fast they can grow. In a federated network, no single group can dictate other groups’ rules, this governance mechanism has to be well established form the beginning in order to avoid future power struggles and choke points. No one really knows how the future will look like, but we have an idea of how it should look. The rise of decentralized social sites can definitely help us reach a safer, more democratic and healthier world.

🗂️ Directory of decentralized Social Sites

Minds - Post videos, blogs, images and set statuses. Message and video chat securely with groups or directly with friends. Trending feeds and hashtags allows you to discover articles of your interest. Alternative to Facebook and YouTube.
Diaspora - The online social world where you are in control - One of the earliest decentralized social networks. In 2010 was touted as a Facebook alternative. It did get some deserving limelight in its initial years but it got confined to only a handful of niche members.
Aether - Open source, P2P platform for self-governing communities with auditable moderation and mod elections. The content is ephemeral in nature and it is kept only for six months unless someone saves it. No centralized servers. It’s democratic communities elect mods and can impeach them by votes.
Mastodon - Twitter like, a network of thousands of communities operated by different organizations and individuals that provide a seamless social media experience. You can host your own Mastodon instance and choose to connect it with other Mastodon instances or you simply join one of the existing Mastodon instances
LBRY - Blockchain based decentralization protocol. On top of that protocol, you get a digital marketplace powered by its own cryptocurrency. Though LBRY allows creators to offer 1 kind of digital content like movies, books and games, it is essentially promoted as an YouTube alternative.
KARMA - Instagram clone built on top of open source blockchain platform. Every like and share your content gets, earns you KARMA tokens. You can use these tokens to boost your content or convert it to real money through one of the partner crypto exchanges.

👀 Under the Radar

Donut - Donuts initially exist as a simple community point token on the /r/ethtrader subreddit, but can also be converted into an ERC-20 token for moving and spending the token outside of the platform — such as for trading it on an exchange for other cryptocurrencies. The site’s title reads “The Ethereum investment community.” Another meme coin with an unknown creator, but overseen by Carl Larson.

🐕 Shiba Inu - $1 dollar invested a year ago would have been over $18 million today. aimed to be the Ethereum-based counterpart to Dogecoin’s Srypt-based mining algorithm. Shiba Inu and the SHIB token are part of a swarm of dog-themed cryptocurrencies, including Baby Dogecoin (BabyDoge), Dogecoin (DOGE), JINDO INU (JIND), Alaska Inu (LAS), and Alaskan Malamute Token (LASM).

📹 Theta - is a blockchain powered network created for the video streaming industry. Founded on March 2019, theta has multiple strategic corporate investors as Samsung NEXT, Sony Innovation Fund, media investors BDMI Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, CAA Creative Artists Agency, and traditional Silicon Valley VCs including DCM, Sierra Ventures and the VR Fund. They also have a great team of advisors including Steve Chen, co-founder of YouTube and Justin Kan, co-founder of Twitch. It has grown 40% in value this past week.

🗄️ Filecoin - A powerful and dynamic distributed cloud storage network for your data. It aims to store data in a decentralized manner. Unlike cloud storage companies like Amazon Web Services or Cloudflare, which are prone to the problems of centralization, Filecoin leverages its decentralized nature to protect the integrity of a data’s location, making it easily retrievable and hard to censor.

Stellar - Open network for storing and moving money. When it was released in July 2014, one of its goals was boosting financial inclusion by reaching the world’s unbanked — but soon afterwards, its priorities shifted to helping financial firms connect with one another through blockchain technology. It appreciated close to 1,000% during he past year.

📰 News

NFT Craze

👠 Dolce & Gabbana sells 9 NFTs for $5.65 million - The nine piece non-fungible token (NFT) collection from luxury fashion brand Dolce & Gabbana, “Collezione Genesi,” sold for a total of $5.65 million on the UNXD digital platform. The most expensive piece went for $1.275 million.

🦍 BoringStone is an NFT magazine memorializing major stories in the Metaverse at-large and bringing different projects and communities together in a fun and engaging experience.

😲 Tweet mocking how little value NFTs have is going for $5K, yes, as an NFT.
👻Lack of Liquidity may be why NFTs are a riskier investment than crypto. Nonfungible tokens (NFT) are unique, and matching sellers with buyers is much more difficult.
✉️ Stamp collecting is a hobby that’s been passed down for generations — and now, it’s getting a crypto makeover. Swiss Post has announced that it is releasing a collection of 175,000 Crypto Stamps at the end of November.

The rise of Decentralized Social Sites

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