By Cyrus Jean: Just recently, the popular messaging platform, WhatsApp, went into snooze mode for nearly 2 hours, knocking over a billion of its users offline. What followed was an endless barrage of memes, tweets and social media headlines highlighting the frustration caused by the downtime.
It was not the first time that WhatsApp was down. There have been several instances in the past where messaging apps 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 24/7 because one day out of the blue the government may decide to disconnect one of these apps. I’ll wait for you to find an example. Tik-Tok, time is up.
The fact that WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube or any centralized messaging platform may go offline or be deleted tomorrow establishes the need for a decentralized messaging platform.
The advent of Web3 has given rise to a range of decentralized services and applications that do not need a centralized server to function. These apps are mostly built on blockchain technology. Blockchain allows applications to exist on many nodes (computers), so no application can go offline or be deleted so easily.
But is all this worth migrating to decentralized platforms? What if these services aren’t as good as current offerings? I know you have your doubts and may not buy the idea of these decentralized messiahs, but hear me out, you might change your mind before I finish this article.
THE STATUS QUO
Apparently, a lot of users are fed up with the “My Way or the Highway” attitude of big tech companies. If you want to use WhatsApp, you must accept the privacy policy. If you want to use Gmail, your emails will be accessible for ads. Every aspect around these “free” centralized services has a catch. Eventually, you trade your private data for the luxury of using these services.
A Netflix documentary called The Social Dilemma dives deeper into how your behavior on these messaging apps and social media is tracked, and then a profile is created to target specific ads. The AI is so detailed that Meta (formerly known as Facebook) might 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 feast on your data and then sell it to advertisers for cash. It’s their business model to make a profit. Selling ads using your data has made these companies worth billions. Imagine if these advertisers paid you for your data! What if web browsers (without compromising your data) paid you to browse the internet? The blockchain makes this possible.
Several 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 several servers around the world so that no entity can track it. Some benefits include censorship resistance, ownership of personal data, and increased control over user-generated content.
Brave is a decentralized web browser that offers its users cryptography to browse the internet. To add to that, you also get faster browsing and less exposure to censorship, among other features.
Social media platforms like Mastadon offer such freedom where posts and videos can’t be deleted so easily just because some corporate high hater didn’t like your content. The downside is that there can be a lot of hate speech ending up on the platforms, but since it’s a community platform, users can vote for a specific post to be removed if it encourages hate speech, incites violence, or violates any of the Platform’s policies. But again, the community decides the fate of the content; not the CEOs, not the government or some group of angry activists.
But how do platforms like Mastadon make money for maintenance since they’re free and don’t contain ads or are subscription-based? This is the beauty of blockchain technology. Since all data is stored on multiple nodes around the world, each node handles its maintenance for rewards in the form of cryptocurrencies. The algorithm incentivizes nodes to work hard to maintain the blockchain. This way everyone can be happy.
The future of social media and internet browsing could see users being paid crypto for browsing or getting rewards for hosting ads on their personalized pages. A true democratic ecosystem.
The possibilities are endless and in this way the user or consumer is directly incentivized to interact with brands without the need for an intermediary like 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 you don’t have to worry about your video being censored or taken down unless told otherwise by community members. And that community would be made up of free-spirited, sensible, and unbiased members on the platform.
Messaging apps like Session, Dm3 are examples of decentralized alternatives to WhatsApp, Telegram and Signal. They aren’t as good as the current batch of Web2 apps, but being on decentralized servers gives them the added advantage of meeting the needs of Web3 users.
IT’S TIME TO CHANGE ?
It’s a tough question and most would be on a knife edge to answer it. Web2 applications have set a very high benchmark for decentralized platforms. Fluidity, ease of access and the vast 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’m not saying that these decentralized platforms are perfect alternatives. WhatsApp and YouTube have been the de facto go-to for all your communication and information-seeking needs for years. I don’t want to discredit years of research and development and the money these big tech companies have invested in their products to make them user-friendly and popular among billions of users around the world. They are great products and even I use them daily.
However, like me, many are looking for a better alternative because they fear that their private chats will be monitored or end up being part of the evening news debates. The Rhea/Deepika WhatsApp chat leaks and the Telegrams data breach are perfect examples. Since the data on the blockchain is encrypted and does not exist on a single server, the risks of breaches or leaks are not that common.
Facebook (Meta) has lost its appeal as a huge number of users are opting out of the social media platform. Hashtags like #deletefacebook were trending on Twitter a while ago. Instagram, YouTube and Google still dominate the roost, but live in constant fear of increasing Web3 adoption because it would see the “power of data” shift into people’s hands and that’s not something these big tech companies want.
Just recently, the former boss of Twitter, the decentralized social media platform backed by Jack Dorsey, BlueSky, had over 30,000 sign-ups in just 48 hours, meaning people are ready and excited to idea to try the new upcoming Web3 platforms. And that’s just the beginning.
With the evolution of blockchain technology and the birth of new AI-powered Web3 applications, the future of social media and messaging platforms is not on centralized servers but on blockchain. This will ensure economic neutrality by keeping those pesky and intrusive ads away.
I understand that these decentralized messaging apps and social media platforms are still in a nascent stage of development and may not offer the type of services that WhatsApp or Telegram currently bring to the table. Key issues such as scalability, latency, security and incentives need to be addressed before decentralized Web3 based applications can become mainstream and I believe it is only a matter of time before Apps like these don’t appear on your phone’s “most used apps” list. .
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