Sufficient Decentralization for Social Networks https://www.varunsrinivasan.com//2022/01/11/sufficient-decentralization-for-social-networks
“A decentralized social network can challenge this hypothesis by making two powerful promises that centralized networks cannot. They can guarantee that users own a direct relationship with their audience and that developers can always build apps on the network.”
“A decentralized social networking protocol could change this dynamic by ensuring open access to the network. Companies can still make money by offering services, as Gmail does with email and Github does with Git. But decentralizing access ensures that they can’t be monopolistic and ignore users. It creates a market-based approach where the best ideas can compete on equal footing.”
people need to be let experiment with ideas and interoperability
and do it permissionlessly, they dont need to have political power etc to experiment with new ideas
“Developer APIs became a liability that reduced revenue and increased complexity, and were limited or turned off completely. Now, only people who had political power within the company could experiment with new ideas.”
“A network design that leverages on-chain systems to decentralize ownership while using off-chain systems for a better user experience is a better path to building social networks.”
dont need everything to be onchain the core decentralized things are:
- being able to register a unique username
- send messages from that username
- read messages from any valid username
and the ability to do all these regardless of what client you use for the protocol
good example is email notifications, spam filtering, feed curation etc are client specific
but sending and viewing emails work throughout
“There are three challenging problems with decentralizing social networks that have slowed adoption: scaling networks, decentralizing the name registry, and building novel social primitives.”
“Managed hosts can offer features that would be impractical for users to run at scale, like a content moderation system.”
“Protocols like email and cryptocurrencies made changing providers easy from day one, which in turn made collusion rare and short-lived.”
to prevent certain managed hosts to charge more / centralize
“However, smart contracts have finally made decentralized registries possible.”
“The contract ensures that only that user can change the URL, and the blockchain provides conflict resolution if two people try to register the same name simultaneously. ENS and Unstoppable Domains have implemented similar systems on Ethereum.”