Further musings on the future of social media

Direct from the desk of Dane Williams.

The future of social media is more than just shitposting and organising coffee dates.

No doubt I’m not the only one here on LeoFinance that spends a lot of time thinking about the future of social media.

Now I essentially use Twitter to shitpost and Facebook to ensure I don’t miss out on social events organised by friends and family.

But while I sit at my desk in a country governed in a way where I have freedom to (within reason) do and say what I want, I’m fully aware that there are many others who aren’t afforded the same freedoms I take for granted.

For them, social media isn’t just about shitposting doggo content and organising which cafe to meet friends at today.

It’s about having the freedom to speak openly and freely about who they are, what they believe and organising meetups to promote genuine life improving change.

Yep.

The future of social media is more than my shitty use case - It is to provide ALL human beings a communication platform.

So with that end goal in mind, we know social media platforms requires the following 2 non-negotiables:

Account ownership
Censorship-resistance

This post continues to speak about why a decentralised, immutable base layer is key to the future of social media and which blockchain’s can truly allow Web3 social media dApps to deliver.

Spoiler alert: Hive will provide the immutable base layer required for the future of social media.

The immutable base layer required for the future of social media

Social media platforms will only be censorship-resistant if built as Web3 dApps on immutable blockchains.

This is because it’s all good and well to say you’re censorship-resistant.

But the only way to be technically censorship-resistant is by ensuring the base layer that your social media platform runs on is also censorship-resistant.

Think about it this way…

If your base network can be taken over, then whatever your particular social media dApp built on top says it can do is made completely redundant.

The prime example of this has already played out on the Steem blockchain.

I’m sure you’re aware of the biggest social media dApp built on top of the Steem blockchain, called Steemit.

Just like Elon Musk has done since taking over Twitter, Steemit claimed account ownership and censorship-resistance.

But as soon as Justin Sun was able to take over the Steem blockchain, he gained full control over transactions and therefore content published to the network.

Users quickly discovered that no matter what they were told, once the underlying network was compromised, there was nothing the platform itself could do.

Whether Steemit as a social media dApp liked it or not, as long as they were housed on the Steem blockchain, they could no longer provide users account ownership or censorship-resistance.

If you don’t think the same can and will happen to Twitter in its current form, then you are naive.

All that matters when it comes to the future of social media is an immutable base layer for dApps to be built on top of.

Best of probabilities to you.

PS. If you were around during the Steem days, I’d love for you to jump into the comments and share what you were told around Steemit’s ability to provide censorship-resistance at the time.

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