Currently the best known and most used social networks in the world work with a centralized model, controlled by a company that owns the platform. This is the case of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc. It is a single company that is behind the development, maintenance, even the regulation of the content.
For the users of these platforms, it is common to see how new regulations are applied overnight to the content, and even to the advertising that runs within them, as is the case on Facebook and Instagram on certain topics.
Agencies and advertisers suffer from frequent changes in policies, internal rules and algorithms that affect the way they advertise; In the end, everything is the decision of a single company, the owner of the platform, and all decisions are made unilaterally.
The decentralized model of the metaverse
In the last 5 years several decentralized metaverses have been born, some of the best known are Decentraland, Somnium Space and The Sanbox and what they have in common is that they operate from the Blockchain, for example the first two are built on the Ethereum Blockchain .
Although many associate blockchain with cryptocurrencies because it is how Bitcoin was built, in reality this technology is applied in other areas and disciplines with a very significant impact compared to other security models.
In a decentralized model there is no one company ruling everything, instead there is one Decentralized Autonomous Organization or DAO for its acronym in English. In this case, decisions are made democratically among all members, which really helps to develop the community, because its members are the ones who propose and decide its future. Blockchain plays a very important role here, as it is the way to ensure that all information is kept safe and unaltered.
Decentralized social networks
Although for some it may sound utopian that there is a social network that works as a decentralized metaverse, today there are already social networks of this type, but since they are not backed by a company, that means that most people do not know about them. Mastodon and Steem are clear examples of open source platforms using the blockchain, which allows the information that circulates through them to be stored securely on servers anywhere in the world and not in one place.
On the other hand, instead of the content being supervised by a company according to its own interests or external pressures; the founder of a decentralized (federated) social network establishes from the beginning the terms and guidelines of acceptable behavior for the platform and these can evolve over time according to how the community itself changes, not what suits a company.
From my perspective, social networks should have been decentralized from the beginning, to guarantee that the content that flows through them is really free and circulates according to what the community of users wants, searches for and likes.
Below I include several decentralized social networks that can be accessed today:
Aether
https://getaether.net/
Diaspora
https://diasporafoundation.org/
Mastodon
https://joinmastodon.org/
Karma
https://karmaapp.io/
lbry
https://lbry.org/
MeWe
https://mewe.com/
minds
https://www.minds.com/newsfeed/subscriptions
Signal
https://www.signal.org/en/
Steem
https://steem.com/
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