I’m building an open-source Decentralized Social Media platform
I’m going to start by explaining why we need Decentralized Social Media. When a social media platform is run by a centralized entity, there usually tends to be some biased censorship. Decentralized social media makes it so that no single entity can be in control of what can and can’t be seen. Instead, communities collectively get to make all of the decisions through voting mechanisms. A social network is completely decentralized only if everyone in the network has an equal say to one another. If there is some way of gaining more voting power than someone else, the network becomes more centralized in a way, we don’t want that.
In a decentralized social media network, everyone has the opportunity to get a cut of ad revenue if sponsors would like to advertise. Since communities are responsible for maintaining their networks, the reward for doing so is distributed among them.
How do you make social media decentralized? The same way that makes cryptocurrency decentralized, blockchain technology.
Is this the end of Web2.0 social media? (All social media platforms used today) The answer is no, they will still act as the front-end. I’ll explain this further down
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OverWrite is the name of my project proposal. It’s a decentralized social media platform where a network of content creators can all equally contribute to publicly shared ideas or pieces of content such as a community run blog, novel, screenplay, and more. Everyone is rewarded SPONSO tokens which are sold to sponsors, 100% of the total ad revenue is equally disrupted among users in the network, anyone can promote their posts by using PROMO tokens which are earned through blockchain validation. Communities of users are responsible for self-governing their networks and get rewarded for doing so.
The Network
OverWrite is open-source, meaning it can be forked and modified to satisfy the needs of different communities. Let’s take a look at the following example. Community A wants to build a decentralized network to talk all about health and fitness so they create a network using OverWrite. Community B also wants to build a decentralized network but they want to modify the default consensus mechanism and they have a niche for creative writing, so they modify the core OverWrite code and create their network. We have two different networks that use OverWrite which are both isolated from each other. Just because you have an identification in Network A (community A), that doesn’t mean you automatically have one in Network B. I think networks should be isolated from each other for a variety of reasons.
- Communities get to decide who they want to add to their networks. It’s not an open house, people can’t just join by creating a profile. Their profile needs to be approved or vouched by people in the network.
- If anyone is free to join any network whenever they want, it creates a lot of problems that the old social media platforms face today. Bots, scammers, trolls.
- It helps sponsors find their right audiences
- Allows people to build reputable profiles and creates stronger bonds in communities
The Blockchain
The OverWrite blockchain is used for building networks. When someone is added to a network, information about how that person got on the network is added to a block. (Think of this like cryptocurrency transactions except it’s for people, not currency). The reason it does this is so that the community can easily trace malicious accounts and figure out how they got into the network. It can also be used for exchanging digital assets such as PROMO tokens, SPONSO tokens, and non-fungible tokens. Blockchain validators receive PROMO tokens. Still figuring out what kind of consensus mechanism to use.
I’m still not sure how closely tied the blockchain will be with contributions and changes to content. I’m still figuring this out. I’m thinking maybe the blockchain will keep track of people who have made changes to content but not keep track of the actual content itself. The reason is because I don’t want anything such as a blog to be permanently kept on the blockchain. One of the points of community content creation is being able to collectively remove and replace entries to a piece of content.
The Timeline
The timeline is where content goes. When new content is created, it is put on the timeline. If a community is using an OverWrite network to collectively write a book, their contributions can be events in the story and they can specify where they want it on the timeline relevative to already existing events.
Contributions added to the timeline are not permanent as they can be removed or replaced through voting. It’s also up to the community how they want it to work. They can make it so anyone can contribute something or if they need to get their contributions approved first.
The Front-End
The Network, Blockchain, and Timeline are all considered to be part of the back-end. The front-end is an application (UI/UX) that allows users to interact with their network in an easy user-friendly way. Anyone can create a front-end application. All it has to do is be able to log you into your identification on the chain and read/write from/to the back-end. Front-Ends should be designed with absolute decentralization in mind. It should not have the power to censor things that exist on the timeline. Whoever is hosting these applications needs to display the network for how it really is.These applications can also have a feature that lets users connect their wallets from other blockchains if they would like to display their NFTs.
Right now, I'm networking with blockchain devs and project managers so I can get this project started. I’m also trying to secure funding for the project because it’s not going to be cheap to make. Like I said, I want OverWrite to be completely open-source and I will be constantly updating everyone following the project. With that said, I would also very much appreciate it if I can get more blockchain devs (little to professional experience) and enthusiasts to join this community. I really appreciate feedback. If you're interested in joining the community behind this project, please join our new discord server. Thanks for reading
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