Why social media and messaging apps on blockchain might be a better option | OPINION

By Cyrus John: Recently, the popular messaging platform WhatsApp went into hibernation mode for almost 2 hours, making more than a billion of its users offline. What followed was an endless barrage of memes, tweets and headlines across social media highlighting the frustration the downtime had caused.

This was not the first time WhatsApp was down. There have been several instances in the past when messaging applications or social media platforms like Instagram and YouTube have been down due to server issues. Not to mention that there is no guarantee that these services will be available to you 24×7, because one day out of the blue, the government may decide to pull the plug on some of these apps. I’ll wait until you can come up with an example. Tik-Tok, time is up.

The fact that WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube or any centralized messaging platform can go offline or be removed tomorrow establishes the need for a decentralized messaging platform.

The advent of Web3 has given rise to a number of decentralized services and applications that do not need a centralized server to function. These applications are mainly built on top of blockchain technology. Blockchain allows applications to exist on many nodes (computers), so no app on it cannot go offline or be removed so easily.

But is all this worth migrating to decentralized platforms? What if these services are not as good as today’s offerings? I know you have your doubts and may not buy the idea of ​​these decentralized messiahs, but hear me out, you may have a change of heart before I close this piece.

STATUS QUO

Apparently, many users have had it with the “My Way or the Highway” attitude of major tech companies. If you want to use WhatsApp, you must agree to the privacy policy. If you want to use Gmail, you get access to your emails for ads. Every aspect around these ‘free’ centralized services has a catch. In the end, you trade your private data for the luxury of using these services.

A Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma delves deeper into how your behavior on these messaging apps and social media is tracked and then profiled to target specific ads. AI is so detailed that Meta (formerly known as Facebook) may know more about you than you know about yourself.

Just like there are no free lunches in life, these messaging apps and social media platforms enjoy your data and then sell it to advertisers for money. This is their business model to make money. Selling ads using your data has made these companies worth billions. Imagine if these advertisers paid you for your data! What if browsers (without compromising your data) paid you to surf the internet? Blockchain makes this possible.

More decentralized social media platforms give users more autonomy and control over their data. In this way, all your browsing data and information is stored on multiple servers around the world so that no single device can track it. Some benefits include resistance to censorship, ownership of personal data, and more control over user-generated content.

Brave is a decentralized browser that offers its users crypto to surf the internet. To add to this, you also get faster browsing and reduced exposure to censorship among other features.

Social media platforms like Mastadon offer such freedom where posts and videos cannot be removed so easily just because some top hat at the company didn’t like your content. The downside to this is that there can be a lot of hate speech that ends up on platforms, but since this is a community-driven platform, users can vote for a particular post to be removed if it promotes hate speech, incites violence, or violates any of the platform’s guidelines. But again, the community determines the fate of the content; not CEOs, not the government or a group of angry activists.

But how do platforms like Mastadon make money for maintenance since it’s free and doesn’t have ads or is subscription-based? This is the beauty of blockchain technology. Since all data is stored on multiple nodes across the globe, each node manages the maintenance for rewards in the form of cryptocurrencies. The algorithm incentivizes nodes for the hard work they put into maintaining the blockchain. This way, everyone can be happy.

The future of social media and web surfing could see users being paid in crypto to surf or getting rewards for hosting ads on their personal pages. A true democratic ecosystem.

The possibilities are endless, and in this way the user or consumer is directly motivated to interact with brands without the need for an intermediary such as Facebook or Google Chrome.

LBRY is another example of a decentralized video hosting platform (like YouTube). You can upload hours of video content on it and not have to worry about your video being censored or taken down unless the community members say otherwise. And this community would be free-thinking, reasonable and objective members on the platform.

Messaging apps such as Session, Dm3 are examples of decentralized alternatives to WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. They are not as good as the current batch of Web2 apps, but being on decentralized servers gives them the added advantage of serving Web3 users.

TIME TO CHANGE?

This is a difficult question, and most people will sit on a razor’s edge when answering this. Web2 apps have set a very high standard for decentralized platforms to match. The fluidity, the ease of access and the huge ecosystem; not to mention that billions of users from your ‘pados waali aunty’ to ‘rickshaw wala’ already know how to use WhatsApp or YouTube.

I am not saying that these decentralized platforms are the perfect alternatives. WhatsApp and YouTube have been the de facto gold standard for all your communication and information seeking needs for years. I don’t want to discredit the years of research and development and the money these big tech companies have put into their products to make them easy to use and popular with billions of users worldwide. These are excellent products and even I use them daily.

However, like me, many are looking for a better option as they fear their private chats are being monitored or could end up being part of evening news debates. The Rhea/Deepika WhatsApp chat leaks and the Telegram data breach are good examples. Since data on the blockchain is encrypted and does not exist on a single server, the chances of breaches or leaks are not that common.

Facebook (Meta) has lost traction as a significant number of users choose to leave the social media platform. Hashtags like #deletefacebook were popular on Twitter a while back. Instagram, YouTube and Google still reign supreme, but live in constant fear of increasing Web3 adoption as this would see the “power of data” move into the hands of the people, and that’s not what these big tech companies want.

Recently, ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey-backed decentralized social media platform BlueSky received more than 30,000 signups in just 48 hours, which means people are up and excited to try out new and upcoming Web3 platforms. And this is just the beginning.

With the development of blockchain technology and the birth of new AI-enabled Web3 applications, the future of social media and messaging platforms is not on centralized servers, but on the blockchain. This will ensure financial neutrality by keeping the annoying and invasive ads away.

I understand that these messaging applications and decentralized social media platforms are still at a nascent stage of development and may not offer the kind of services that WhatsApp or Telegram currently bring to the table. Key issues like scalability, latency, security, and incentives need to be addressed before Web3-based decentralized apps can become mainstream, and I feel like it’s only a matter of time before apps like these hit the phone’s “most used apps” list.