Building a decentralised Social Network

Users are the product, not the customer. Centralised social media is not a benign way to connect people to one another. While Facebook may connect people better than any other service, it does so at a cost: it gathers troves of data on participants and uses that data to sell targeted advertising.
Eric C. Jansen, ChFC

Social networking form an integral slice of time for the daily activities of internet users today. Statista reports that during the fourth quarter of 2020, Facebook reported almost 1.85 billion daily active users (DAU). Overall, daily active users accounted for 66 percent of monthly active users. With roughly 2.8 billion monthly active users.

Most existing social networking platforms:

• Are centralised
• Sole authority to control all the user data.
• Users agree to policies of social network sites
• Personal data is used for targeted advertising on and off the network.
• Users have to explicitly opt-out of certain applications to maintain control of the privacy of their data
• Do not share ad-revenue with it’s users.

Decentralised social networks

Our goal is to disrupt and challenge the way we share our snapshots of life and interact with one another through our centralised social media platforms.

Centralised social media networks have been around since the dawn of the Internet feeding on off our data and scraping our information to sell off to third parties to help them peddle their goods to us in real-time.

Polkasocial’s vision is to stand up a decentralised future by giving ownership of content back to our users, by empowering freedom of speech as a core principle on our network and developing a reward system in which contributors are rewarded for their collateral.

Polkasocial is a place where users can share moments, photos, video, stream, private message and everything that is attractive in other centralised platforms, without the data leeching and forced advertising.

Key features of Polkasocial

Confidentiality

Users of Polkasocial independently build the rules for using the data developed by them, prohibiting and giving permission for transfer, sale and monetisation. Blockchains, Parachains and smart contracts will be responsible for delivering these rules. Anyone can be sure of their reliability and honesty, as Polkasocial will be open source.

User rights

In centralised social networks, ordinary users have virtually no rights, these services are provided “as is” and you cannot demand better quality, reliability or security. In decentralised systems and in this case, Polkasocial platform, users manage the system by reaching consensus on all common issues ( development and management), as well as the decision in what requires privacy.

Reduced Censorship1

Popular Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube accounts often suffer due to allegedly violating platform censorship regulations. This is especially apparent in countries where there are issues with freedom of speech. For example, in Russia, Iran and China, some accounts are blocked, that inform about:

•“Atheism, evolutionism:” — insulting the feelings of believers;

•“The rights of sexual minorities” — the promotion of homosexuality;

• “Change of power” — incitement to extremism, kindling hatred, work for foreign special services, insult of a government official.. Reduced Censorship1
• 1 Source: https://merehead.com/blog/how-to-build-a-decentralized-blockchain-social-network-in-7-steps/