Blockchain powered Social Platform
After last week's foray into the world of digital supply chain highlighted the vision of KoineArth, I started getting more interested in Decentralised Communities...SubSocial caught my eye as a Blockchain-powered social platform.
With normal social media channels, your data and time is essentially the payment for using free channels.
SubSocial believe that Facebook shouldn’t be able to sell your data without paying you; YouTube shouldn’t get paid more for advertising than creators do, and Twitter shouldn’t be able to ban you or block your tweets because they disagree with you.
Their software uses the Substrate blockchain framework and IPFS for decentralised file storage. This enables personalised news feed and notifications, transparent reputation, full text searching, rich content formats, without sacrificing SEO (search engine optimization).
It seems to me like a decentralised version of Reddit or Medium, where a set of subreddits or blogs on Medium run on their own chain but SubSocial promises to be more than a simple blogging/content sharing platform with crypto payments.
Alex Siman is calling it "a revolution in connecting social media with decentralised finance - creating new economic paradigms based on social media."
Certainly, Blockchain’s peer-to-peer payments, combined with DeFi and gamification offers endless opportunities for users to generate income for their content while also earning money for doing other activities like watching ads. Could this be the incentive that attracts people away from traditional social media channels?
Now Elon Musk has bought Twitter, we expect to hear more about his decentralisation goals for Twitter; Facebook has also confirmed it's looking into non-fungible tokens, so could this become a David versus Goliath situation?
Whatever happens it's fair to say Blockchain technology has opened up doors for the decentralisation of all the major industries that run our world in the past few years. What started in finance has spread like quick-fire into almost every industry, including media and entertainment.
Besides the censorship, biased algorithms, and lack of transparency – one of the biggest problems with traditional social media channels is that users have very little control over their data security
There will be some real changes that blockchain brings to social networking particularly around governance, a creator-centred economy and community ownership which may help to solve some of these problems.
With the technology only expected to go uphill from here, and projects like Subsocial already implementing this kind of tech, we could be headed towards a future where trustless, decentralised networks become the future of social media…