Decentralized Social Media: A New Era of Privacy and Security

 If you are tired of endless advertising, selling user data, lack of freedom of speech, censorship, political partisanship, decentralized social networks should appeal to you.

Alternative social networks are built on the basis of distributed ledger technology, operate on independent servers and are open source. This makes them decentralized. Web3 social media policy is not governed by a particular company or individuals, the users themselves set the rules. The confidentiality and security of such platforms is ensured by cryptographic methods.

The rise of decentralized social networks is evidenced by the emergence of the DeSo blockchain. This is the new Layer1 network, which is designed specifically to create a new generation of social networks.

The most popular decentralized social networks

Steemit

One of the very first decentralized social networks, released on the Steem blockchain in 2016. On Steemit, users are rewarded in STEEM tokens for being active on the platform. Platform coins are minted daily and added to a special community pool. At a certain time, they are transferred to the users' accounts https://btcman.io/exchanges, depending on how many votes their content received.

Mastodon

Decentralized social networking platform, which is called the analogue of Twitter. Unlike its centralized “friend”, this is not a separate application, but a network of thousands of servers. They play the role of different social networks that can exist in one space called "fedivers" (decentralized association of social networks). Anyone can host their own Mastodon social network and connect it to others, or simply join existing options like Mastodon Social.

After Elon Musk bought Twitter, half a million users switched to the Mastodon decentralized platform.

Minds

The decentralized social network is similar to the well-known and influential social media pioneer, but positions itself as anti-Facebook. This platform has its own MINDS token. Users receive it as a reward for generating interesting posts, helping with social network management, and other activities that benefit Minds.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Web3 Social Networks

Decentralized social networks allow a person to have better control over what they see and post on social networks. They provide more autonomy due to the lack of moderators. However, the founders of such a platform, together with the users, can establish rules that must be followed by other participants.

The positive aspects include a low level of censorship and full ownership of their data. No one except the user himself can delete his content. In addition, you can register in alternative social networks without being tied to an email address or phone number.

The advantage is also the fact that different decentralized social networks can interact with each other thanks to the federative universe of social networks, which is united by the ActivityPub protocol. For example, having an account on one of the Mastodon servers, you can send messages and share content with a user using another distributed social network that is connected to the feederverse ecosystem.

Although the potential of decentralized social networks is huge, they will have to go through many transformations in order to win the attention of users who are used to centralized giants.