Project Liberty – the plan to replace Facebook by using blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol
Project Liberty would use blockchain to construct a new internet infrastructure called the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol. With cryptocurrencies, blockchain stores information about the tokens in everyone’s digital wallets; the DSNP would do the same for social connections. Facebook owns the data about the social connections between its users, giving it an enormous advantage over competitors. If all social media companies drew from a common social graph, the theory goes, they’d have to compete by offering better services, and the chance of any single company becoming so dominant would plummet.
We have numerous open social media protocols (eg. ActivityPub, XMPP) already, but none have really risen to the top as the go-to alternative that everyone was going to adopt. Maybe throwing real money as a new protocol could help, with the remainder of the money being the incentive for existing networks to adopt it. Facebook won't as it did use open protocols before and then removed them. But if the impetus for this is enough, and enough other networks adopt it, then maybe the "critical mass" on Facebook will switch to one of the alternative networks. We've certainly seen with Friendica, Diaspora, Hubzilla, etc that you can have two or more protocols running and keeping different networks seamlessly connected. So this is fully possible. It just needs to be an open standard, not controlled by any single company or entity.
See Project Liberty – the plan to replace Facebook
#technology #walledgardens #projectliberty #socialnetwork #deletefacebook
Billionaire is pouring $100 million into an attempt to rebuild the foundations of social media.
