Why Decentralized Social?
Why does the world need a decentralized social graph?
1. Censorship
Centralized control of our social data means that a few large companies have complete control over what social opinions, ideas, and content get propagated.
This censorship comes in different flavors; politically driven suspensions by platforms, nation-state pressured censoring, or unsolicited/unexplained censorships (ex. shadow banning).
2. Lost Creator Value
Social media content produces so much value for the world, yet in Web 2.0 content creators only capture a sliver of that value.
3. Data is siloed and redundant
In the centralized structure of Web 2.0, our social data/graphs are “walled gardens”. Moving your data between systems is incredibly difficult and usually not possible. This creates a high switching costs; it adds friction for users and wastes time as users repeatedly build and declare connections whenever onboarding a new application.
4. Stifled Innovation
Siloed data also means reduced innovation. With only a few players having access to all our data, independent developers are unable to explore that data and build useful products on top of it. If someone has an idea for a better Instagram frontend, or a better feed algorithm, they don’t have the ability to leverage all the data that’s been generated by users to build out their idea; even with consent from those users. Discord is an example of a Web2 that is slightly opening up this with their developer SDK for bots, but it’s still limited and only exposes what the company decides it wants to share
Read more about why we think the world needs a decentralized social graph in our blog post: