DeSo: The Decentralized Social Network
Social Features on Bare Metal
The Value of Decentralizing Social Media
Today, social media is even more centralized than the financial industry was before the creation of Bitcoin. Many private companies effectively control public discourse and earn monopoly profits off of content that they don’t even create. Meanwhile, the creators who produce this content are underpaid, under-engaged, and under-monetized, thanks to an outdated ads-driven business model. The ads-driven business model also forces social media companies to keep a walled garden around content created on their platforms and prevent external developers from innovating or building apps.
DeSo Foundation believes these problems can be solved by decentralizing social media like Bitcoin and Ethereum are decentralizing the financial system. In particular, Bitcoin created a way to store transactions on a public ledger that no individual entity can monopolize, which has led to the disruption of the financial industry. Similarly, DeSo Foundation believes this technology can now be extended, for the first time, to run a social network without needing to rely on a centralized gatekeeper.
While much research went into scaling “decentralized finance” or “DeFi” applications, relatively little has been invested in building blockchains that can scale social media applications. Even though the latter category is arguably just as significant, if not more extensive, and holds just as much promise for value creation. Moreover, while several general-purpose blockchains tout their ability to scale to tens of thousands of transactions per second, none of them is currently equipped to handle the unique storage and indexing requirements of social media applications at scale. To use an analogy from the centralized world, the infrastructure that powers the New York Stock Exchange today is vastly different from that which powers Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter — they have completely different architectures tailored to support their respective applications at a massive scale. DeSo represents a more than two-year effort to create a blockchain capable of decentralizing the social media category. DeSo Foundation believes it presents the first clear path to solving the existing problems that plague social media today.
How Does DeSo Work?
In terms of architecture, an excellent way to understand DeSo is to imagine a Bitcoin node, only evolved to be able to handle a much more comprehensive array of transaction types than just sending/receiving money, with a vast amount of custom storage and indexing logic tailor-made to support social features at scale.
As an elementary example, consider a social transaction that updates one’s username. A node needs to check that another user’s username is not held before allowing the transaction to go through. Simple, right? Except that when you have just a million users, this lookup becomes prohibitively expensive on even the most advanced general-purpose blockchains today. In contrast, DeSo can support this lookup with access to bare metal, and it can do it cheaply and efficiently by creating a simple key-value index. This information is as fast as it would be for a centralized social application and can even be shared across multiple disks or nodes as the user base grows. The advantages of bare metal only increase as usage increases and more use-cases are considered, such as checking that a parent post exists before allowing someone to reply or even checking that an NFT is for sale before allowing someone to place a bid.
As another simple example, consider displaying a simple list of a user’s most recent posts. Because general-purpose blockchains do not generally support ordered lists, this is not even possible without building an off-chain index. In contrast, DeSo natively supports indexes such as posts ordered by timestamp, profiles listed by the value of their coin, NFT bids organized by which NFT they’re associated with, and much more, and all of these indexes can scale as the user-base grows. It also significantly reduces the complexity of running a node, substantially increasing the ecosystem’s decentralization and the number of apps built on top of DeSo.
This developer guide is a good starting point for developers interested in diving into the lower-level specifics. The code walkthrough is the best way to internalize how everything fits together entirely. It may look dense, but it is written in plain English and shouldn’t take more than an hour or two to internalize fully.
The Importance of Storing Everything On-Chain
DeSo Foundation believes it is crucial to store every piece of data we possibly can directly on the blockchain and adjust the chain’s architecture by whatever means necessary to maintain this. In the long-term, Foundation believes this value will prove critical in ensuring that DeSo’s growth surpasses that of other networks. DeSo’s end-state does not mirror the closed, highly-centralized social ecosystem we have today.
To be concrete, below is a complete list of everything that DeSo is currently looking to store on-chain, and the notable exceptions:
All profiles
All posts and comments
All private messages between users, which are end-to-end encrypted
All likes and follows
All social token activity
All social tipping activity
All NFT activity, including NFT bids
All $DESO transfer activity
Links to all rich media, such as video and images
All profile verifications via a new verification paradigm called “associations” (coming soon)
Exceptions:
Raw images and videos are stored in centralized but publicly accessible and easily replicable repositories, making the on-chain links sufficient to guarantee access into perpetuity.
Emails and phone numbers are stored by individual node operators in order to protect users’ privacy. DeSo Foundation do not think this presents a significant centralization risk; however, if this proves incorrect then this information can be encrypted and stored with the profile in a privacy-preserving fashion relatively easily.
Decisions about what profiles to show or hide, or how to curate content, lie with node operators. However, DeSo Foundation thinks this is a positive force for decentralization.
As more features get added to DeSo, the Foundation will ensure that all data posing a centralization risk lives on-chain. Also, the Foundation believes that this value will separate DeSo from other more centralized efforts in value creation.
What lies ahead
Moderation of content is a critical topic for building a decentralized social network, and it is probably the topic DeSo Foundation spent most of its time on besides engineering design.
Considering the data is open, the best machine learning researchers in the world can build APIs that can label all of the content on the blockchain in a way it won’t be possible today. Intern, it will allow all node operators to consume the data they want to remain compliant. DeSo would create an economy of scale around moderation that Foundation believes can be more robust than what’s possible within the confines of a single corporate entity. All of the open data also allows the Federal government to analyze the spread of misinformation better, and be more involved in preventing it, than they can be when all of the content people are seeing is locked up in a corporate walled garden.
Influencers and content creators can make money directly without going through a centralized enterprise. Mixing NFT and Social Media will be a fantastic deal in the DeSo environment. For sure exciting future is ahead of us.
