The Future of Social Media is Decentralized on-chain protocols
More than 15 fully on-chain Decentralized Social Media platforms are being built on the Internet Computer Protocol blockchain
Many people may want to invest in cryptocurrencies but don’t want to be tied down to learning the jargon, dapp development, and technical elements.
The first step towards easy adoption is that users are able to purchase their first cryptocurrency with an easy interface or use a dapp on-chain without loading their wallets with tokens
An ideal blockchain would not force users into loading their wallets with tokens to use the chain or its service. More precisely, making users pay gas fees for every transaction is not feasible for mass adoption.
Imagine if every time you clicked a link on the internet and were asked to pay a fee? Seems sustainable? No.
Here’s my DSCVR profile on-chain.
I will not be talking in deep about Metaverse in this article. Metaverse is decentralized internet on the blockchain and doesn’t necessarily have to be 3D. DeSo on Internet Computer can be considered as early metaverse realms.
Decentralized social networks are the future.
Why do we need Decentralized Social media built on Blockchain?
Traditional social media are a wolf in sheep's clothing. They are centralized platforms and services built, managed, and funded by a centralized corporate entity that has full control over the platform and can de-platform anyone anytime.
Legacy Social Media platforms are infested with Censorship, and those who constitute a threat to their ideology are shadow banned. Moreover, the users are surveilled to target them with intrusive ads or to extract their data and sell it to the highest bidder.
If I let my conspiracy theories run wild, I'd argue that web2 social media platforms are a vehicle for psychological warfare against target groups.
Consider this: we already have a type of advertising: commercials. We know that individuals pay the greatest attention to commercials when they are psychologically invasive. Because of this, ads go undetected by those of us who aren't viewing them. Similarly, repeated exposure to echo chambers can dilute a person’s view of their surroundings.
The same concept can be used to criticize social media platforms; they sneak in and gain your attention without you realizing it, then begin the complicated tasks of persuading you to use the platform and extract data secretly.
Users are not compensated for their attention, interaction, content consumption, or for curating content on these networks without several obstacles or the company pocketing a large portion of your revenue.
Meta had intended to keep 48% of users' revenue as a commission charge for utilizing their platform. Commission fees in the web3 area might reach a maximum of 10% until the platforms face community criticism for being greedy.
Shady Algorithms are shaping human interaction in the status quo Internet
One more reason to look forward to Decentralized Social is that shady algorithms will be replaced by open user-customizable algorithms. Users will become the owners of the platform with governance tokens. Your data can also be carried anywhere on-chain, in contrast to web2 services that moats to hold the users captive.
In Web3, Users will be able to Read, Write and Own their data on-chain. Having cryptographically secured ownership over your content can open up hundreds of ways to monetize it with tokens.
Due to their distributed hosting, third-party services would no longer be able to probe into people's personal accounts without their permission. Users can even monetize their data in exchange for tokens if they are okay with it. In this field, the potential uses for blockchain technology are limitless.
Decentralized Social media services are decentralized networks hosted on a decentralized world computer that can host smart contract software autonomously & execute a smart contract computation entirely on the blockchain.
Building DeSo on the Internet Computer
To host and build Decentralized Software on the blockchain, developers need a blockchain that can scale infinitely whilst still remaining openly accessible and usable to end users without sacrificing security & decentralization.
I do not prefer signing every transaction that I interact with while using decentralized social media. This is not just sustainable or user-friendly.
To address this, the Internet Computer was built with innovative user-friendly, and developer-friendly features.
Reverse-gas model with zero gas to end user, where smart contracts pay for their computation themselves, precharged by devs with stable computation gas
Internet Identity for seamless authentication and true web3 identity system.
Canisters can keep the data private with end-to-end blockchain and additional zk proofs
Canisters serve and communicate via HTTPS calls.
Front-end is hosted on-chain, making it more secure and resistant to phishing or other cyber attacks.
Services will be governed by open algorithmic turnkey DAOs, where users can participate in governance with governance tokens.
Canister smart contracts of IC can process logic, maintain state on the chain, and persist data. These web-serving applications are served to a user’s browser directly without relying on any other intermediary or cloud services.
Internet Computer Protocol basically creates a powerful enough world computer to build and host internet scale web3 software and services on the chain.
On Internet Computer, a user doesn’t sign every transaction, but every interaction with dapp is a canister smart contract interaction.
What makes Canister smart contracts smarter?
Internet Computer Protocol creates a very powerful, robust decentralized public blockchain world computer that's millions of times more powerful than any other smart contract blockchain.
Internet Computer smart contracts are independent autonomous on-chain Actors (actor model) with which they can autonomously compute and interact with users, other smart contracts on-chain (IC Network), smart contracts on other chains, or external web servers via HTTPS.
An actor is a primitive in the Actor Model. It is a process with encapsulated state that communicates with other concurrently running actors through asynchronous messages that are received sequentially.
The actor model is a mathematical model of concurrent computation, where, in response to a message, an actor can modify its state, send messages, and create more actors. - IC Wikia
ICP app users i.e. Canister smart contract users, also behave as an actor in this context. Users directly interact with the chain’s smart contract via their browsers.
Smart contracts provide a trustless system for information exchange on the blockchain, thereby removing the need for any third parties. Metaverse will rely on Network Effects, and the ones enabling maximum interoperability will create the most extensive network effects.
Metaverse will be a blockchain-derived internet for exchanging, creating, and storing digital assets leveraging decentralized user agonistic interoperable digital identity systems and authentication.
It is essentially a cryptographic network of decision-making units that allow humans and computers to interact over its ledger (the virtual machine) without any centralized intermediaries. Anyone can communicate with each other from any part of the globe since the chain is global and isn't restricted geographically yet.
So what is being built on the IC?
A variety of internet-scale services are being built on the Internet Computer, ranging from DeFi and NFTs to Decentralized Social.
When we talk about ICP DeSo, its important to note that these services are hosted and run fully-on chain. Every data and computation is stored and processed directly by the web-serving canister smart contracts.
Some of my favorites are
OpenChat, where your chat account also doubles as a DeFi wallet.
Distrikt - Decetralized LinkedIn/Twitter
DSCVR.one - Decentralized Reddit with NFT gating and in-built wallet
Canistore - Decentralized Spotify X Instagram. Create, Play, and License Music NFTs on-chain
Nuance.xyz - On-chain blogging and publishing
This article you are reading right now is entirely hosted on-chain with Fastblocks dapp leveraging Nuance’s protocol.
More DeSo app links can be found here -
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