Trump signed an executive order in response to Twitter placing "fact-checking" labels on his tweets claiming that mail-in ballots would lead to voter fraud. However this may shake out in the short-term, you should be deeply concerned about the near future of social media. And yet, there is no decent decentralized Twitter alternative yet. This is a baffling oversight, but you can bet that there will soon be a race to develop the holy grail of decentralized social media.
Censorship has been a rapidly escalating issue
The issue of censorship on social media has been heating up for quite some time now. Facebook now fact-checks even humorous memes and auto-bans certain words or phrases, even in private messages. Twitter bans users for "deadnaming" or referring to trans persons by their past names. YouTube demonetizes or removes content that provides an alternative to the World Health Organization's take on the recent pandemic. It goes on and on, with examples piling up at a frighteningly fast pace.
The introduction of state intervention makes this a much more urgent need
The looming threat of government involvement in social media rapidly accelerates the need to migrate to something decentralized. Private companies, even tech giants, care about losing customers. If the Twitter experience becomes unbearable with too much speech policing, users will go away, possibly to competitors. While this doesn't stop them from doing bad things, it slows the rate at which they do them, and limits just how bad they can get before they either reverse course or fall to a competitor. But if government gets involved, everything can change overnight, not just for the platform in question but for all. At that point it's no longer a waiting game until the free market balances out the offerings in the social media space, but a mad dash to create something that can't be shut down and get enough people on it in order to make it too big to fail.
A decentralized blockchain alternative is needed, not another company
Of course, this is where plenty will be sure to chime in suggesting non-mainstream platforms as alternatives, claiming a commitment to free speech or other similar platitude. To be frank, we need an actually decentralized, blockchain-based alternative. Simple "new Facebook" type sites won't work, because they're vulnerable to the exact same issues which prompted having this discussion in the first place: censorship, either by the stewards of the platform themselves, or by outside coercion through government. It needs to continue to run if the main website/company/team is shut down, and all speech and content needs to be backed up somewhere it can't be taken down or altered. Why get people to uproot their way of living their lives to migrate over to essentially a ticking time bomb of a platform that will eventually fail them the same as the last one has? I already covered how Joe Rogan moving to Spotify may just delay the inevitable censorship problem. Do it right the first time.
Current decentralized Twitter alternatives, frankly, kind of suck
But, you may say, what about * insert social media platform*? I'm sorry to say that most of them are nowhere near something I can recommend to an average user. Twetch (probably the strongest contender) has a long and nasty multi-stage sign-up process, is expensive to an average user doing regular daily posting, and has little engagement outside of BSV-related content (upon which the platform runs) and insider memes. Memo.Cash is barebones and still resembles a proof-of-concept stage. Flote looks promising but is not actively aiming for decentralization and still has quite a few rough edges.
And to be fair, this is pretty much the case across the whole blockchain space, but at least some key categories have strong competitors. Pure payments/money has all kinds of Bitcoin variants, and in Dash it has an efficient, scalable, and secure digital money, that hopefully should become very easy to use once blockchain usernames hit mainnet. Blogging/content has Hive and others. The star of the show so far is LBRY, which provides a slick and actually decentralized YouTube alternative that works for other content types including text (where you may very well be reading this article). But pure decentralized social media, now that is as of yet far from being fixed.
Just like digital cash, this is a need that will make whoever fills it wildly successful
Why am I harping so much on something as silly as social media as a top priority? Quite simply put, it's probably the single largest and most important nexus of humans and technology. The percentage of our time spent interacting with content and other users on social media is staggering, and it's where most of us receive our news, entertainment, communication (both in semi-public and in private messages), and more. Every other application, whether it be articles, videos, website, etc. frequently gets shared and accessed through social media first. It's essentially the gateway by which most of us access the internet as a whole, and whoever manages to create a great social media experience that can't be censored will be quite handsomely rewarded.
The digital cash use case is similar, and it's the entire reason why Bitcoin (and therefore the rest of the cryptospace) ever became more than a simple novelty. Pretty much none of us (except me) are using cryptocurrency for daily transactions, and most projects have moved past this key use case to newer, sexier, more flashy focuses. But the value proposition of money that no one can stop and everyone can use is so great that when it finally is solved, whoever built it will certainly prosper. Compare this with an area such as social media that's probably more in demand than any other (content/speech censorship affects far more "regular people" than financial censorship), and it's easy to see why it's baffling that no one is taking the development of alternative platforms seriously.
Control the people's everyday speech and communications, and you control the world. Free them from control in these areas, and you etch your name in the blockchain of history. Make a viable decentralized Twitter alternative, already!
If you enjoyed this, please leave a tip, either here or via CoinTree. Thank you! And thanks to my supporters Kingsley Edwards, AnarchyRadio, and Kenn Bosak for their continued support!