The MeWe social network will be integrated into the Frequency blockchain network, a parachain of Polkadot, as announced on April 26 at Consensus 2023. The announcement adds that the company will begin moving its user accounts to the network during this quarter.
Just in from #consensus 2023 – Polkadot parachain @one_frequency has announced a major partnership with social networking app @mewe to connect its 20 million users to Polkadot and the Social Web, giving each of them a social identity and full control over their own data. pic.twitter.com/O39RNtEhDy
— Polkadot @ Consensus 2023 (@Polkadot) April 26, 2023
MeWe launched in 2012 and has been touted as a “Facebook alternative” with supposedly better privacy protections. An Axios report from September claimed that the network had more than 20 million users. Frequency launched as a Polkadot parachain in November 2022.
At a Consensus 2023 panel called “Laying the Foundation for Web3 with Decentralized Social Media and Data Rights,” MeWe CEO Jeffrey Edell stated that the move will allow MeWe to permanently commit to ownership of user data. users:
Blockchain is like doubling down on privacy. One day MeWe could be acquired by someone, a big company, and in that case, the privacy aspects could be lost, but once we commit to blockchain, we commit to privacy.
“We have never monitored, we have never amplified bad news or misinformation, that is not something we do, so of course we are prepared to enter the world of web3,” he said before adding: “We have to move slowly and cautiously, but with a total commitment”.
According to the announcement, the integration between MeWe and Frequency is based on the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which Woodham worked on as part of Frank McCourt’s Project Liberty. McCourt allocated $100 million to the project in June 2021.
Amplica Labs was Frequency’s initial technical partner. Its president, Braxton Woodham, who also participated in the panel, stressed that the partnership between Frequency and MeWe will not solve all social media problems immediately. However, he said that it will provide a basic framework that application developers can build on to solve various problems in the future.
Social media poses many different problems, from user experience to moderation to artificial intelligence algorithms,” he said before explaining that “it’s practically impossible to solve all the problems at once, so the approach we’ve taken together is to link our digital presence on the web to create the social web. “That allows us to attack the data layer and address those difficult problems.”
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