Social media protocols and why decentralization matters | Simone | ETHMumbai

GM it's Mumbai Lemon from it and uh today I wanted to talk a little bit about social media protocols and why decentralization matters in this ecosystem in this space in particular um because I think it's uh our infrastructure layer are now ready for us to build more consumer and social experience on top of them Um a little bit about myself, Amina Manaker, community builder, travel author on Dagodons and I love Farcaster by the way. So talking about social media protocols, uh what are like the key components? So that we have the name space. So the username network with the social graph, the database where all the data stored, the protocol, the platform and the rule set that define how users can interact with each other, how user can interact uh with the network. So using websites or apps and then the rule set of course is about the feed algorithm forbidden actions and other kind of stuff.

And the problem in centralized social networks is that all of these uh is controlled by a single entity. uh thinking about our friend Elonir that owns the Twitter company and this means that he owns the namespace the network the database and everything that I mentioned in the previous slide and it's it's not good because we need to trust him to act in a good way for the ecosystem or the platform and just to give you a recent example of what can happen when you are working or hanging out on a centralized social network is that they can revoke at any time your username. For example, thinking about uh there was this guy owning the X handle uh and you all know that Twitter Twitter recently um rebranded to X and this guy was forced to uh change his uh um handle uh because like X wanted to claim it. Uh and uh yeah, that that's bad. Uh actually there's also a letter here on the right where you see that the X company's writing to the to this guy uh telling them uh to you know that they will receive some gift for this uh um issue that they ghost but by the way so another problem about centralized social networks is that these are wallet gardens meaning that you don't know you you don't own your social graph you can't escape so if I don't like Twitter anymore because of some changes in the APIs or in the feed algorithm I there's not much I can do because if I want to migrate into another social network let's say Reddit I need to bring in all my following all my social graph all my content and and this is not really possible and that's why I believe that we really need to invest more and build more open protocols and not platforms um even though open protocols are not immune to centralization think about email and browsing they are centralized on But at least they allows us moving between competing clients.

So think about how you can reach out to somebody from your Gmail account to their Outlook uh email account. So that that's the power of open protocol like SMTP. And yeah, that said, uh I really recommend you to dig more into this space. Um and uh suggest uh ugly suggested to look more into lens and faraster uh two different web three socials with different approaches but with good things happening behind the scenes and communities of builders creating new stuff and innovating. uh and hopefully like we will have more of these protocols and applications built on top of them soon.

Thank you so much.