Social media networks without a central hub
Most of the time, in Web2, you have to follow the rules of the platform you’re posting on. In theory, this shouldn’t cause any trouble. Users should be able to connect and share in a positive way through social media. Things aren’t quite that easy in real life, though.
Even though Facebook tries hard, moderating the platform has turned out to be a huge job. Since there are now billions of users on the platform, some things that happen on the site will always slip through the cracks and go unnoticed by the people in charge. Those who make it through sometimes end up organizing in ways that are bad for society.
In other cases, perfectly good ideas get caught up in Facebook’s censorship algorithms, making users feel like they have no right to free speech at all. One of these people was activist Jillian York, who was temporarily banned from the platform for sharing half-naked pictures as part of a campaign to raise awareness about breast cancer.
Experts couldn’t help but use this event as a starting point for important conversations about the future of social media. In a 2017 article for Wired, Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula, and Ethan Zuckerman talked about whether a decentralized web3 social media website development network could work. In their words, the biggest problem with getting a lot of people to use these platforms was just getting people to use them.
We join social networks because our friends are there, not because we believe in ideas like decentralization,” they wrote. Even though this may have been true back then and is still mostly true today, some people say that if we don’t challenge this idea, “the human race” will be doomed in the future. SingularityNET CEO and founder Ben Goertzel talked about this in a January 2021 article on Coindesk.
So, how can these social platforms help people in a way that gives them something? Goertzel said that it would be very important for future social media platforms to be open-source, have decentralized ownership, make decisions democratically, and have “explainable” implementations of the artificial intelligence that powers the content algorithms of these platforms.
Social giants from Web2, like Instagram and Facebook, are still in the early stages of their inevitable shifts to Web3. Let’s look at some Web3-native social platforms that hope to lead these changes in the future.
Mirror
What does a social media platform look like in your mind? Most likely, it’s like Facebook in that it has a never-ending stream of posts, pictures, videos, and now NFTs. But if Instagram and Twitter have taught us anything, it’s that social media sites can do well even if they only use one type of media.
Enter Mirror. Mirror bills itself as a Web3 alternative to sites like Medium and Substack. It takes pride in its decentralization, which comes from the fact that its users share ownership of the site. Everything you put on the site is yours, without a doubt. Also, you can mint anything you post on your site as an NFT, set up subscription fees with crypto, and even set up a DAO using the site’s built-in tools.
What’s the best? Everything is made to be simple. When users connect their crypto wallets to the platform, they can freely read and write on it. A mirror is a great way for the Web3 community and project leaders to post anything on the site because it is so easy to use. A mirror is a great choice whether you want to write a detailed white paper or an elaborate shitpost.
MINDS
Want to see more different kinds of content on Web3? Try out MINDS. Users of MINDS can enjoy a full-fledged social media experience without any of the existential horrors that lurk on Web2’s social platforms. MINDS is a decentralized version of Facebook.
So, MINDS is built around a set of features that show what it means to be free on the internet. Its website says that this means giving users a meaningful way to exercise their right to free speech, privacy, self-sovereignty, community governance, a fully functional crypto economy, and an open-source platform. Goertzel already talked about how important that last bit is.
In the whitepaper for MINDS, the company’s founders explain how the platform plans to solve the biggest problems with social media right now. In particular, the so-called “Big Brother practises” of traditional social media, such as “surveillance, algorithm manipulation, and censorship.” To fight against this, MINDS wants to set a good example for other social platforms in the future, especially by keeping its “entire software stack free and open source.”
Lens Protocol
What if you could use social media without having to deal with the (sometimes oppressive) algorithms that make it work? Lens Protocol wants to do just that.
Lens Protocol is made up of a decentralized social graph as its main part. Social graphs are big data maps that show how people and the things they like are connected. The way social media works now, platforms own you, and everyone you know social graphs and can do whatever they want with them. So, sometimes you’ll see targeted ads that are so accurate they’re scary.
But what if you owned all of that information? This is what Lens Protocol users can get. It starts with an NFT of your social graph, which is a record of everything you do online. You can think of it as the Soulbound Tokens of social media (SBTs).
While we wait…
Even though it would be a good thing to fully commit to Web3’s ideas by using social media platforms that were built in its image, it’s not easy to make the jump. According to the 2017 Wired article we just talked about, most people join a social media platform because their friends are there, not because it reflects their ideas and values. But that may not always be the case.
Ironically, the main goal of Web3 is to give ownership of the internet back to the billions of people who use it. This could lead to a return to the kinds of internet experiences people liked in the late 1990s and early 2000s. When everyone’s default homepage was Yahoo, people tried to create their own small communities based on their interests, connections, and hobbies. Web3’s version of social media tries to bring back the beautiful fragmentation of the past. It asks users to join and form communities based on their ideals and principles, which goes beyond fandom.
So, will any of these Web3 social media sites be able to compete with the big Web2 sites? Maybe, maybe not. But if these monopolies ever fall apart, they’ll be there to help the internet figure out what went wrong and make sure no one gets hurt.
