Social Media Networks will be Decentralized | Andra Georgescu

[Music] thank you daniel thank you for that introduction and um for everyone that's tuning in to talk about this topic the future of social media and why we believe it's going to be decentralized um district is a social media network that wants to empower users to take control and ownership over their digital presence and we started off as trying to be a competitor decentralized competitor for linked up but since we've gathered a community that would like to define district in its own terms so now we kind of rely on our users to give us the direction we need in order to position the products correctly i will start by presenting district briefly so you get a sense of our work and perspective and then talk a bit about why decentralized social networks are needed in today's digital landscape what are the pain points that we're trying to address and of course the challenges that come with such a radical change district is a fairly young project um it's being supported and maintained by the open internet foundation a swiss not-for-profit with a mission to promote the expansion of an open internet through the development of digital products and services that empower the user and district is the first project of the foundation we began working on it and putting together a team in february this year we then launched the web app in july and the android android app in september the roadmap would set for ourselves it's pretty ambitious you can find it or not find it on our website um it's district io but so far we've stuck to it and the only real delay on our roadmap was getting the ios app in the apple store we've been back and forth with the reviewers for months but we're hoping to have it published by the end of the year as a christmas present to our users that have been demanding it pretty adamantly um but the idea itself what we're trying to accomplish a decentralized social media network it's not necessarily a new one people have been experimenting with alternatives to what we've now come to refer to as traditional social media networks that featured varying degrees of decentralization and some alternatives have been around for quite some time like mines or mastodon or signal but what is new about a district is the execution and the technology because the platform lives a hundred percent on blockchain so because of the unique capabilities of the internet computer it relies on absolutely no centralized infrastructure like aws um the entirety of the platform including the back end front and all the assets uploaded by district users are stored directly on the internet computer this offers this trick a lot of autonomy and frees it from platform risk for instance during the latest aws outage district worked without any issues whatsoever and there's a new generation of social networks that are being developed right now that take decentralization very seriously and we now have the technology to make this platform truly autonomous but what does it mean for you know the end user well it means that we're tackling some of the major issues that come with the way social media networks function right now and i certainly hope that none of these issues are any news to to you but first and foremost we have the issue of privacy and this is a big one because it's also deeply linked with our data who owns it and how it's being handled privacy is actually one of the fundamental values of district there's a reason why it's considered a fundamental human right and not a privilege but as with most of the human rights issues that we're faced with we've been systematically desensitized to privacy issues we're made to feel like giving up our privacy somehow a required compromise that we need to make in order to be good digital citizens to put it another way web 2 has lost the battle between privacy and convenience right convenience obviously won and that's mostly because of globally adopted social networks and cloud services and sophisticated surveillance tools and this is even more obvious when you look at the fact that even though we retain a certain you know critical approach to sharing data with governments we give away our data to big tech companies like it's nothing of value when in fact data brokerage is an industry that makes 250 billion dollars a year so it's clear that the social media industry has grown big enough and powerful enough that we can't just simply brush side these issues that they're faced with um especially when they impact our society on such a level from cambridge analytica to countless privacy issues um data leaks the platforming censorship it's clear that we can't and won't ignore these things forever and when i see people that are casually relying on big tech companies to have their best interests and hop at heart and treat their personal and private data as a respectful steward i'm always a bit surprised what do we actually base these assumptions on we've seen time and time again that privacy is treated like an obstacle that needs to be overcome in order to gain better control under these guise of providing security but at the same time our data has never been less secure and more exposed this is why decentralized social networks are deeply needed and why for district at least it's such a big deal that a technology like the internet computer allows it to exist autonomously so we don't need to be the product in order to enjoy the product at least not anymore and um we definitely need to do more to dispel this myth that privacy is an imperative only if you have something to hide people actually have a right to privacy and not because they're hiding something and they should be allowed to do bad things because they should be free to be themselves without it being anybody's business that shouldn't be a radical notion or be treated like something suspicious at all i actually believe that privacy preserving technologies are more pro-security than pro-crime but it does depend on the context because even though it's such a big deal for us to to ensure the user's privacy we shouldn't treat this in absolute terms it's not black and white sometimes we need it and we should have that choice but other times there's a need for transparency and that's closely linked to how much power an entity has the more power you will the more it justifies uh the demand for transparency because your action impacts many others not just yourself but this general lack of privacy it's also deeply linked to the expectation of the user data how could a social media network whose business model is to sell your data exists otherwise so the reason why the future of social media is decentralized is because it challenges this status quo and it radically changes the relationship between the platform and its users it turns it from a parasitic relationship to a symbiotic one and it empowers the user to become an active participant in the decision-making and shape the way they want to be treated by the platforms that they use and they should because they are the only value that a social network has and the reason why that platform went from being a website to being a network and fixing these issues is not very easy it's it comes with its own challenges but it's worthwhile because shutting down social media networks or refusing to use them all together it's not really a viable option these platforms are needed and often create an environment that nurtures positive relationships and cooperation so we need these means of communication and expression we just don't need to pay for them with our data or submit the censorship or face the platforming we need to build better alternatives and this is what we're trying to do district doesn't require any personal data from you when you sign up you don't need to provide anything you don't even need a username or password it's login it's an anonymous blockchain um authentication framework called the internet con the internet identity um and it's based on biometrics and that information never leaves your device so you don't have to you know have a wallet or no key management is involved it's pretty straightforward district doesn't know your name age nationality gender and it has no interest in your shopping preferences because it's not selling you anything so not only does the district platform not collect its user data it didn't implement any advertising models um nor do we have any interest actually in developing advertising tools like we see now on the main traditional networks because that would ultimately mean to exploit the user's data and that's not what we're about what we are interested in is uh developing the platform's governance model that will empower the district user to take an active role and in decision making and maybe that means they decide that they disagree with our take on advertising and they want to develop or maybe fund the development of an advertising tool that's again up to the community so decentralization of social media network is not only a technological paradigm shift but also a shift in the way we define our relationship with our digital identity presence and our responsibility within our digital community and communities are one of the biggest promises of web3 the community itself having power over the product instead of it being the other way around and this community can be anything it can be a business any type of organization so right now if you want to build a community around your business on a social media platform you need to accept its role as an intermediary between you and your community and as is the case with most intermediaries you need to also accept the restrictions the gatekeeping and feeder fees not only that but platforms like facebook will actively restrict your access to the community that you build in order to charge you extra reaching them right so that doesn't really make sense in web 3 we also plan to show that there's a better way of building a community around your business and passion values because right now a district has the expected normal social media features like creating and customizing your profile posting liking commenting finding new users to follow um but the end goal is way more ambitious and that is to become a community building tool that allows you to create your own group called district and tokenize it and you know create your own access and government rules maybe an nft based access and overall have all the tools that you need to manage it and um everything should be built on top of this fully decentralized network that gives you independence and autonomy and i believe this would be a powerful tool and it will bring a lot of value to those organizations that are looking to build and grow their communities on their own terms but just because we're uh fixing all these odd problems or at least trying very hard to doesn't mean that we have a perfect solution if anything we're discovering new challenges but i hope these prove to be better problems to solve than what we have right now a big challenge for a decentralized social network is moderation um that's a big challenge even for a centralized uh social network as we've seen in the case of twitter facebook and basically every single social media network uh proper incentivization and finding a balance and make sure you don't you know either incentivize or over incentivize and that both the users and the platforms are are aligned and looking in the same direction and pursuing the same goals it's also a delicate thing in a decentralized system governance is also a challenge because the one token one vote system seems to be not well designed for social media network but there are ways to overcome it and district is definitely putting a lot of resources into it and of course once these three big issues are solved we still have to overcome the technical cultural barriers to entry which means um getting outside of the blockchain and crypto bubble and out into the world and presenting these benefits and this unique value proposition to people that are not familiarized with decentralization and blockchain um i really hope we get to solve this last one but i understand that we do have some questions daniel or maybe not hello andra yes we have around 10 12 questions already oh did i read them or i think i pasted them on our zoom i think that's going to be oh very interesting yeah let's let's see should i read them do we have the time i think we have 10 more minutes yeah we have 10 minutes and also i take the advantage to ask the audience if they want to send more happy too happy to take them but yeah we have ten minutes to answer the questions we already have okay awesome so one question here is do you think internet identity is mature enough to do this at scale uh no that's sure like not in this form um it is enough for our needs right now again district is is pretty young but when we're talking two years from now we would need a more user-friendly and uh you know accessible way of logging in this is also very easy for someone that's experienced with blockchain and technology a bit and understands what's going on but we need maybe to replace anchors with names or usernames or whatever failures you would like to use but the internet identity is also young it's a very fresh out of the oven solution that wasn't necessarily designed as a login for social media network it was designed for you to access dns and manage everything there so maybe we will develop a better and friendlier and more social media appropriate login when the time comes for now it it serves us very well great thanks for the answer another interesting question is i love this but what is the monetization model for a decentralized social network or another way to put it is is it sustainable how does it make money to make it sustainable how does it work yeah the we the good thing is that district doesn't need a lot of money to stay live on the internet computer actually um [Music] we did some um digging about this and see to see how much we spent and since we launched in july until i think a couple of weeks ago we spent under a hundred dollars to have the internet uh to have the district on top of the internet computer so that's that's the good news um there are so the monetization the goal of it is to make districts sustainable not to make it necessarily profitable um and we can do that through a lot of different uh means for instance the open internet foundation that's in charge of supporting and maintaining the project for now at least has staked 40 000 icp for eight years which in turn generates rewards rewards used to pay for everything needed so that district can stay live and especially free for its users thank you andra another interesting question will you ever interoperate with other protocols like ethereum and another i'm having another question here is because district is built on ic internet computer why did you choose internet computer well um we chose the internet computer because it allows us to host the entirety of the application on the blockchain right we don't have the front end on any centralized system like aws we needed districts to be different and we needed it to make an actual change and having it fully unchained is a great value proposition for us integrating with ethereum i think that's going to be possible quite soon at a basic level and then we'll see from there but we love the ethereum community and everything uh that's being built on ethereum is mind-blowing and it's growing so fast so it's definitely in the cards for us got it another interesting question if i go to district.app i shared the link with the audience what can i do what can i do as a user can i share tweets or images or how does it work yeah so you can you can go you create an identity and you have a profile that you can customize you put your profile photo cover photo your file you can put links in your bio or other users um you can post content that's written attach photographs we don't have video support yet but you can attach photographs and even upload chips so that's fun um and uh it has all the basic social media network features uh that you'd expect a discovery feed uh you know find new users and follow them hashtags everything you sometimes hear victoria here this is already yeah another i had another question here is that if there is the app already for ios yes the app um has been you know completed at the same time with the android app maybe a week later or something like that but we've been um been required to develop new features by the app store like blocking which is a bit more complicated when you're relying exclusively you know your canister and the internet computer and you don't have traditional database worklet or service uh but it's done and we've resubmitted the app and hopefully it's going to be published by christmas fingers crossed guys okay i understood a question maybe a little bit forward thinking difficult maybe to answer clearly what do you think about regulating the social media in terms of cyber abuse that is a very interesting and delicate topic that we're spending a lot of time on because we need to make sure so just because we focus on privacy and we protect the data that that doesn't mean that we are just going to create a wild wild west type of ecosystem who would like to join an environment that's toxic moderation is not a bad thing it's a bad thing when it's being abused when you have that power and you just you know moderate against people that you don't agree with not against people that are actually damaging the community that you're being a part of so this is why i moderation was first on my list of challenges we need to have community moderators we need to properly incentivize them we need to randomize them so we make sure that they don't gang up on people they don't like um it's it's a big challenge um we do have a proposal that's almost final we're still testing and singing there's we're sure that when we launch our moderation our decentralized moderation tool it's going to backfire in surprising ways it always does so when we plan something though you know it's not always it doesn't work as intended as we've seen with profile verification so we have any district users they know that we're on our fourth iteration of profile verification uh processes right and that's going to be the case with moderation as well what we can promise is that we're going to try until we find the good fit not that we have a perfect solution but again proper incentivization make sure you randomize moderator make sure we include them in all possible arenas where abuse can take place those things are very important correct and maybe the last question because we only have one minute left one district user asks when the dm function is going to come dm function probably q2 2022 i think probably because i'm not very sure we start working on it holidays are coming we do have some priorities for q1 uh 2022 that are not direct messaging so my safest bet is q2 2022 you could expect direct messaging so glad we have district users here hi guys yeah we read some greetings from russia well yeah from some district users and maybe my last question quickly who is behind district i mean i know we know you right but who has the open internet foundation basically is the entity that supports and maintains the project um my co-founder is you might know him as well our team is divided between romania serbia and switzerland and holland starting this month so we're pretty like a diverse european team we work remotely but our hq and the foundation is in switzerland thank you very much andra it's been a pleasure again we had you already in april so it's such a pleasure to have you again talking about the importance of privacy when it comes to our lives in the digital space so thank you once again and keep it up thank you thank you for having me and have a great time on the european blockchain convention it's gonna be awesome bye guys [Music]