Bitcoin Forum

Hi All,

I’m performing a market analysis exercise and wondered what you guys think about decentralised versions of the large social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and others.

Today we have large corporations controlling the social media world who appear on the surface to provide “free” platforms that keep us all connected. Under the surface of course, it’s not free at all. The large corporations fund themselves by selling advertising space in our news feeds, therefore exploiting the users of the platforms as potential customers for those advertisers willing to pay the highest price. Others will sell our data to other organisations who might want to market to us and even more sinisterly perhaps sell quite detailed information about us that is used to sway the way we might vote in an election for political gain.

So using the large social media platforms does come at a cost albeit not a direct cost that is always immediately obvious.

My question to the forum is with a decentralised social media platform that is not owned by a large corporation, how much would one be prepared to pay to use it, knowing that your privacy, security and autonomy is protected.

Would you be prepared for example to pay £1/$1/1euro per month knowing that there are no adverts and no onward selling of your personal data?

Conversely, does anyone care, as long as the service is “free”?

I’d be interested in your thoughts/opinion?

Kind regards

Steve

I know a couple of free ones (friendica (https://friendi.ca/) ^{[stats (https://the-federation.info/friendica)]} and diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org/) ^{[stats (https://the-federation.info/diaspora)]}) with not very impressive stats ^[IMO] and if you're going to add fees ^{[no matter how small]}, then I'm expecting to see a lot fewer people using it.
^{- Btw, not sure how accurate those stats were, and what I said, doesn't represent the whole community.}

If there's a central party to pay to, I'm not so convinced it's decentralized. It instantly makes me think it's only using "decentralized" as a buzz word.
For a truely decentralized social media platform, I imagine I'd have to download all information and store it locally. That won't happen for $1 per month. So I won't pay for it.

It also helps I don't use social media, and I'm pretty convinced by now we'd all be better off without them anyway.

Well, I'm more taking into consideration about the community within the platforms. If the community within it engaged enough and intrigued me, I might join them. As example, I do have Twitter account and indeed I try to protect my privacy when using it. The thing is if my privacy, security, and autonomy protected as how you said it, but the community within the platform is lacking, it might be a turn-off.

Anyway, I'd have a reference about privacy-oriented social networks, it might help you to do some market analysis. https://www.privacytools.io/providers/social-networks/

To be honest, I am not willing to pay a single cent to any social media platform and I don't trust anyone to respect my privacy including creators of any platform like that.
I guess some people would pay $1 or 1 euro to remove ads but first you need to have platform that works and you need to have real people that are really interested to engage in conversation.
Most of the social media  today are just waste of time, they are used as ego show-off platforms and they are abused for spreading propaganda and tracking people activity.

I checked some numbers on Facebook: they earn $9 (https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/28/facebook-fb-earnings-q1-2021.html) per user per quarter. That's $3 per month per user, with a 80% (https://www.gurufocus.com/term/grossmargin/FB/Gross%252BMargin/) profit margin. So by these numbers, $1 per month should be more than enough to run social media without ads, but you won't get there without funding it first. And by the time you're big enough to consider getting rid of ads in exchange for charging users, the profit you're making is already much more than the average user will ever be willing to pay. I remember the days Zuckerberg said he cared more about the user experience than about making money. Those days are long gone.
So Adblock it is :P

I am adblocking everything for years with uBlock origin, it is almost unbearable to browse internet without it, and I don't use facebook at all.

People should realize that big tech don't just want more money, they want more power and control, and they will not gave up monopoly so easy even if that means bloody hands and cracked skulls.

Mmmmm, I could see paying a small amount (no more than $5 monthly) for a service like this. However, how would I be able to verify with such a media outlet that they aren't collecting and storing my information? That would be a huge thing for many people I'm sure. You'd have to have a way for people to verify the privacy.

Transparency through open source app and end-to-end encrypted data on decentralised storage, is what we are thinking.

Many people love buzz words and instantly believe it. For me, buzz words are like alarm bells by now.

I'd love to see a decentralized messenger though. I can imagine a P2P system where you only store the (encrypted) messages for all your contacts, maybe just for 30 days. This makes the amount of data manageable, while still providing redundancy.
But it instantly introduces the next problem: P2P requires direct connections, so sharing your IP with all contacts. I wouldn't like that.

Telegram is NOT decentralized at all, everything is totally centralized on their servers and creator of Telegram, Pavel Durov often called as Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg, also created Russian speaking version of facebook called VKontakte.

There are some alternatives for Telegram who are trying to be decentralized like Session, but I didn't notice any of them getting real traction and growing user base.
I would be very careful with any new app or social media that claims decentralization and privacy, after story was published about Anom phones operated by FBI.

Working together


We are considering using our "smart data access" concept as a private data layer for decentralised applications.  https://datona-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/what.html (https://datona-lib.readthedocs.io/en/latest/what.html)  The data layer is decentralised not in the sense of a p2p network but in the sense that anyone can deploy a data server and the user can choose which they use (or deploy their own).  If the user is technical enough they could use their own crypto and server.  For others the payment would go to whichever datona-enabled data service they use and whichever blockchain proxy service they use to publish and pay for transactions on their behalf.

The moment you have 100 million users that pay you 1$ a month, what makes you?  ;D
My hunch is on a large corporation that owns the platform, can hike prices at any time, can go bankrupt and run the platform into the ground or, that could still behind all the publicity still sell our data! Not only you plan on unloading all the costs on the people, by having them pay for your network and storage but you also plan on charging them.

This sounds like all those private tracker business models, you do all the work and if you're unable to keep your ratio we might consider a "donation" so you can keep being a member of our community and work for us!

Sorry but when the first thing is about how much are we willing to pay and not about what you offer, I can see where this is going!

regardless of whether something like this may cost money, how should the technical implementation work when it comes to moderation. and at the same time be decentralized.

That's a really good question.  It's easy to ignore or dismiss the moderation side of things on the basis of free speech.  I think there are a few possibilities that depend on the type of social media platform.  

If you take a look at LBRY, the blockchain platform is completely decentralised and unmoderated so anyone can post any content.  The web based Odysee is a window to the LBRY platform and moderates the content it shows based on its policies.  In an ideal future, any aspiring editor should be able to deploy their own Odysee-like website with their own moderation policy and users can choose which they use.  This model might work for a decentralised version of twitter - in fact for anything based on public posts.

A decentralised Facebook probably doesn't need a platform wide moderator since users are in control of who can read their posts and communities can self moderate by arguing, unfriending, deleting posts, deleting comments etc.

How about an option that sits above and integrates with current social media platforms that gives the user the choice on where their "activity" is registered? Centralised (eg. current option), Decentralised, Both).

Thoughts?

To be able to make sure that your data will not be shared and protect, it might just be best for the decentralized social media not to ask for any information at all But just an email and make it free. Free will make it more available for all. It may be chaotic because there are impostors going to create someone else profile it will also be more decentralized.