Decentralized social media is a hot topic due to censorship, tracking and control of the likes of Facebook and Twitter. With the release of Voice.com, I’d like to suggest another approach. I think Voice will be amazing and would compliment what I’m suggesting here by providing verified users. However, I think that what I’m suggesting here will be orders of magnitude more decentralized and censorship resistant than other things out there.
https://youtu.be/Z4g_hqN0DvU
Here's the video version of this. Scroll down for audio or just subscribe to the podcast :)
Decentralized Protocol Not Just Blockchain
The internet is built on some fundamental decentralized protocols. Examples of this are email, tcp/ip, rss, podcasts, wordpress? The distinction I’d like to make here is that a protocol, in this sense, is something that anyone can run and is compatible with anyone else running it.
Take email, for example. I can set up a mail server on my computer at home. I can rent a server and run the mail server there. Or I can use a more centralized version such as gmail. All of these set-up use the same protocol and worth with each other. There are levels of decentralization and yes there’s some censorship by Email Service Providers, like gmail, but that is seen as a feature/benefit (spam filtering) that allows users to make a choice.
Having a decentralized protocol (like rss) that interacts with a blockchain, rather than having it all run on a blockchain is the best scenario.
Now, imagine open-source software, like wordpress that can be self hosted or hosted en masse. This software allows you to post content to a feed but it also allows you to read the feeds of others and comment/like the content of others.
So kind of like twitter as a protocol rather than twitter as a walled garden.
Add to that blockchain, crypto and
If Wordpress, TRSST and EOS had a Baby
Wordpress, as many people know, is both open-source publishing software (wordpress.org) and a hosted blogging platform (wordpress.com). Using a model similar to wordpress would have huge decentralization benefits. As outlined above, it would be more of a protocol that could be self-hosted or hosted. The difference for social would be that the software would include publishing and reading/aggregating. That’s something wordpress doesn’t currently do.
TRSST was an idea from 2013 that had a lot of traction starting out - raising $65k on kickstarter. I’ve checked in on the project every once in a while since I heard about it but it seems to have fizzled out due to lack of follow-through. The concept was to combine an RSS feed publisher with an RSS feed reader along with cryptography and bitcoin then mix it all together as an open-source, self-hosted twitter-like service with greater security. Their website is sadly no-longer but you can see their github and kickstarter. Here’s their whitepaper.
Using RSS was a great idea because it makes it backwards compatible with much of the web.
So, this concept is to have an open-source software that publishes like wordpress and reads like google reader.
