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A Commendable Decentralized Social Network
If you've ever been bound by Twitter or Facebook policies, you might just appreciate the limitless freedom of creating your own social media world in a self-regulatory ecosystem of choosing what you want to read, what you want to share—without having to deal with algorithms. The beauty of engaging in this kind of world, both today and tomorrow, is the liberty decentralized socials have offered against the centralized control put on users by autonomous policies for user-interactions.
You will agree that we all want to be free to diversely share contributions or opinions on social media, but the fear of receiving a pop-up notification like, “your account has been suspended” will get you into, somewhat of a slave-like, complacent caution in your interaction. It might just be considered as spam, or in a few cases, it might be the different origin of followers you have, which you might be suspected as a fake user. The discomfort of not having a free user experience, a challenge that may lead to termination, is one major thing users hope to liberate themselves from, which is why the future of decentralized socials should not be ignored as we pursue total social freedom through decentralization.
A good look at what we have today, and what to expect tomorrow, is a pivotal issue that must be generally considered, where Web 3.0 is gradually lifting off the centralization weight on users.
Let's start with today.
Recent Decentralized Social Media Apps: Their Features and How They Spice Up the Social Space
Today we are witnessing the inception of decentralized socials which has brought a liberty glowing ecosystem for user experience. These platforms include:
Mastodon: This open-source platform is a fediverse that has decentralized socials with an individual, having the freedom of creating one, and also interacting with other socials. This platform has offered an interoperable experience where you don't have to create different user profiles for different socials (servers).
Lens Protocol: This particular platform offers free NFT mint to users where users can mint their profile as an NFT. These NFTs can be offered in marketplaces where they can be monetized.
Steemit: Rewarding programs for users is an enticing feature to motivate Web 3.0 users in engaging with decentralized social, which Steemit has provided. So by just engaging with other users, you get rewarded with their token.
Phaver: This platform enables cross-posting across different social networks. It adopts web 2 social features like news feed, posts, and groups for a free censorship experience for speeches of all kinds.
There are many other decentralized socials on the Web 3.0 space, but this is the first four picks of the top decentralized socials. Among these, and many others, there is a noteworthy experience and features decentralized social futuristically aims to polish into the space.
The Noteworthy Features on Decentralized Social To Expect in the Future
Mastodon, one of the biggest federated socials, currently incorporates user-dynamic features like claiming control over your timeline, building your audience, moderating it the way you want it to be—either by making your own terms, or joining servers with terms that align with your interest.
To further augment this fediverse, this web 3 app makes it easier for newbies to set up their account, by including privacy setting as an on-boarding step. Users will be aware of their privacy rights before using the platform, which is a great way of ensuring that users are fully maximizing their experience on the space.
Adding of server settings, is also a future plan for user-discoverability of accounts. A server can control his visibility to others by setting discoverable features; this enhances the privacy policy of decentralized users.
After account setup and privacy experience is maximized, Mastodon plans to provide a more considerable deleting feature for users, making it slow, with a second-choice thought of cancelation. Deleting a large federated social network like this with many luxurious features is quite expensive to rethink.
It also promises to make log-out cacheable to reduce server loading protocols in log-out page generation. This will simply make a cache, like a photocopy, of your first log-out page, increasing fast response time and scalability.
While these features are very promising and noteworthy, the decentralized platform has not fully taken off. By fully taking off, this refers to the mass volume of users interacting on the platform, compared to traditional social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn, which have over 368 millions and over 134.5 million users respectively. According to Statistica, Mastodon, which is a fediverse on its own, that embodies multiple servers for interoperability, has over 10 million users as of last year, 2023. As of 2024 May, Lens protocol founder reported the growth of Lens users to have grown above 350,000 users. These variably proofs the low number of users on decentralized socials compared to web 2 social media platforms.
Why It Has Not Yet Taken off: What Can Be Done For it to Spread Globally
Following a comment on a reddit post on why decentralized social networks did not reach its popularity, ‘selling’ has not really been maximized on the decentralized social network.
“Decentralization is not a selling point.”
This is quite true for the decentralized platform. Insofar as the art of selling cannot be overruled in the human world, traditional decentralized social media offers a unique selling space. To further balance this, a decentralized platform can be utilized for selling on the basis of user server moderation and privacy setting, but if a user sets a rule that does not align with other users’ interest, this indirectly pushes them away, who, of course, cannot interfere with the self-regulatory policies of the initial user.
In the centralized social media system, rules and regulations moderate users' experience, even though they may attimes be too controlling; it has a way of narrowing down liberation to post, while optimizing a restricted and more focused area on selling.
Look at LinkedIn for example, it is more focused on sharing values, where services and values are exchanged. You can be sure to meet people who have the services you need: like a technical writer, a consultant, teachers, etc. Facebook and Instagram for instance, because of its large user population, have a large market place where people can sell their stocks, meet people, sell courses as well as items. They have lasted long before the inception of Web 3.0, and it takes less education to easily navigate the space, especially for the “Middle Child Generation” also known as the Gen X, who are a bit lower in technological engagement with the fast-changing world.
There is no doubt about the tendency of having this same selling experience in the decentralized world, but a mere look on the Gen X and the centralized platform personnels, who are not yet adhering to the benefits of decentralized socials will put a fat weight on the other side of decentralization, while raising up centralization node.
Could centralized bodies not also be considered? How about trying to integrate centralization and decentralization? That's impossible, right!
So what can be done to draw a large mass of people into this remarkable platform?
The Approaches to this Challenges
Sequel to the incorporation of decentralization, which gives users autonomous power, decentralized socials have tilted the method and approach to how brands should run their market or sell. This has involved the use of decentralized tokens and monetization pattern, where liquid money has substituted fiat tokens. However, to enhance this censorship-free, user-moderation, privacy, and interoperable experience—which is an exciting offer to the users of social media, there is a lot of collaboration and partnership to be done with traditional brands.
Cryptocurrency Initiative for Brand Transaction: They may have to support brands by implementing cryptocurrency initiatives in their transactions. This will lead to awareness and crypto education which primarily supports decentralized socials.
Community-first Social Strategy campaign: A typical example of ads on social media platforms aims to draw a portion of the focus for the owners than the users. Most of these ads are quite annoying for users, creating a concern for decision-making in those platforms, which is totally out of place in the centralization system.
Features like open source, transparency, moderation, and user-centric consideration is why decentralization will be greatly appreciated by the users. This will distribute power to users to gain control over their data and how they choose to interact; everything will overturn the hands of centralized authorities. Decentralized platforms can launch these campaigns with big brands like discord community, Stack Overflow, Fortnite, Behance, Udemy, Coursera eBay, Spotify, WordPress, Medium, Reddit. All these brands focus more on community needs, while encouraging user participation.
Blockchain Education: Aggressive blockchain education will help suffice the unawareness and complex decentralized topics. AMA sessions on Twitter for blockchain projects can be extended to brands. Brands like Udemy can include decentralization courses with FAQs to deal with complex questions. Availing this decentralization awareness consistently to the reach of traditional users will create an expectation of what the future of decentralized social will look like.
The Issues to Be Addressed in the Future
Censorship-Liberty Usage: The freedom for a user to generate rules and moderate his space the way he wants, and the way he chooses to speak, may eventually lead to an avenue for speeches and attack on people liberally. While decentralized social promises good features for users to experience a free and self-controlling ecosystem, it does not intend to create enemies on the platform. Even when other users have the liberty to block or not connect with a specific user, hate groups can have their own space for pinching out their main targets on the platform. This in its form is an abuse which the platform itself has no centralized authority over users. However, AI tools will emerge in the future to moderate specific contents on hate speech, while maintaining the privacy of its users.
Scalability Enhancement: The issue of having a smooth experience despite the traffic of users engaging simultaneously and maintaining good performance remains an issue today to solve. After all, decentralization is still growing; it is addressing scalability issues with layer 2 solutions to help foster a fast transaction process. A faster interaction for user-friendly experience is the utopia that may just be the line between traditional social media and decentralized social media.
