What are Decentralized Social Network and why are they different from their classic counterpart.

With the advent of Blockchains, the so-called dApps are gaining a lot of popularity lately and new ones are being developed and published every day.

The term dApp stands for Decentralized Application and they work much like cryptocurrencies: every action the user does is validated from a group of indipendent validators called nodes. When the majority of them agree about the results of the action, that action is called confirmed and it’s registered, toghether with all the results, in the Blockchain.

There are a lots of different types of dApps: crypto exchanges, social networks, casinos, games and much more.

One of the most famous dApp is called CryptoKitties and it’s basically a trading game where you have to collect and trade virtual cats. The peculiarity is that this game is based on NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens), a special type of Smart Contract that grants that every cat is unique and can’t be duplicated in any way.

Smart Contracts are the core of every dApp: they contain the logic behind evry decentralized application. Once it has been published on the blockchain, it can’t be removed and both the code and who called what function of the contract and the results of this call are publicly available.

To give an idea of how much this type of apps is gaining popularity, note that the most expensive CryptoKitten was bought in 2018 for 600 Ether, which at the time corresponded to about 172 thousands of US Dollars while today (1 October 2021) corresponds to almost 2 million (1949658.00 USD).

Even if they are less famous than games like CryptoKitties, Decentralized Social Networks are also becoming more and more used.

Decentralized Socials (just like anything else) can be both a good and a bad thing depending on how they are used and for what.

The examples shown here are based on a non-existent social network run on the Ethereum network, but the concepts are the same as if it was run on any other Blockchain that supports Smart Contracts.

Privacy is probably the biggest advantage of using Decentralized Socials. If you want to use a Decentralized Social Network (or any other dApp), you have to make a call to the Smart Contract that handles the dApp, and to make this calls, you have to use a crypto wallet with positive balance.

As said before, every call to the Contract is registered and publicly available, so if, for example, the address 0x1234 makes a post, everyone will see that 0x1234 has made a post, but if no one knows who controls 0x1234, no one knows the real person behind the post.

Similarly, if you know that your friend controls the address 0x5678 and address 0x5678 make a post, you can be sure that the person behind the post is your friend.

The reason behind this is that to control an address, you have to know its private key, and the only way we know to get it is to brute force it. The problem is that there are 2²⁵⁵ possible keys (about 10⁷⁷), that is a really big number if you think that the number of atoms in the visible universe is estimated to be only 1000 times bigger (about 10⁸⁰).

Another advantage is that to post something you have to pay a fee to the validators, so the number of spam or meaningless post will be very small.

This brings also a disadvantage: the fee could preclude a big number of people from posting in this type of social networks.

Finally, the most ambiguous characteristic of Decentralized Social Networks is about censorship and moderation. Given the nature of Blockchains, once the post is made, it’s impossible to remove it and this could be good and bad at the same time.

While this feature could be very useful for spreading news to, from and within countries with dictatorial regimes, (assuming that internet is not completely blocked) what will happen if someone posts something that according to law is illegal?

I honestly don’t know but note that “illegal” is a relative term. What is not illegal where you live can be illegal in other places (including the aforementioned countries with dictatorial regimes).