Decentralized social media: The next big thing in crypto?

NFTs and the Metaverse are the hottest topics in the cryptocurrency ecosystem right now, but the next big thing might just be decentralized social media. Like decentralized finance, decentralized social media platforms don’t have a centralized governing body and may, someday, provide viable alternatives to established platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. The technology is currently evolving just beyond the embryonic stage of development.

Yung Beef, or YB — who serves as content lead and community manager at Subsocial — says that centralized social media platforms are unfair to community members and content creators. “It seems pretty obvious that centralized social networks are susceptible to lots of shady stuff, with the mystery algorithms controlling what people see, people getting shadowbanned or banned outright for whatever reason, etc. And it just gets worse when you factor in that a lot of people earn their livelihood on these platforms and their food bill is totally at the whim of the central authority.”

According to Subsocial, the centralized social media industry is plagued by global censorship, a lack of customization, unfair monetization, algorithm dictatorship and a monopoly on network effects. 

Stani Kulechov, the CEO of Aave and a decentralized social media developer, believes that content creators should have a permissionless, censorship-resistant distribution channel with their audience. He tells Magazine that “At least the people that are posting the content, creating the content, consuming it, sharing it — they would definitely benefit from decentralized social media.”

Kulechov made headlines in and outside of the cryptocurrency community last summer when he hinted that crypto giant Aave was considering building “Twitter on Ethereum.”

Since @jack is going to build Aave on Bitcoin, Aave should build Twitter on Ethereum

— stani.v3 (