We hear a lot of chatter about this. Decentralized social media seems to be the talk right now. Obviously, with the censorship that is taking place along with the discussions of what responsibility platforms have, it is just a total mess.
The solution to this is a decentralized system where people are free to post what they desire. This means the reader has the responsibility to ignore content he or she find objectionable, being able to research what is fake and what is not, and take control of what is followed or seen.
Of course, this is not in the plans for those who have power but, then again, we are not exactly asking their permission.
We are also aware there is a market for this. Even Jack Dorsey is talking about making a "decentralized alternative to Twitter". While most of us believe this is a line, it does show how the topic is on the minds of many.
Therefore, what is going to usher in this new era?
Source
Where To Build It?
This is a major problem. Sure there are a lot of blockchains to choose from. However, how many really have what is needed to provide that functionality that users expect?
If we look around, the list gets short in a fairly rapid period. Not a lot of chains can fulfill the requirements.
To start, we see many with scaling issues. This is one of the major problems with Ethereum. They are supposedly addressing this with the switch to proof-of-stake. A transition like this should help them to scale better than proof-or-work.
Even so, other PoS systems still have some issues with the scaling situation. Social media can generate billions of transactions in a day. This is something that applications are going to have to be able to process at some point. It is what points to the underlying technology.
Then we have the transaction fees. Most are aware this instantly removes Ethereum from the discussion. Even for decentralized finance, the fees are too rich for most.
Many of the newer chains are much improved in that area. However, there is still a fee associated with any transaction. While it is minimal, a few cents apiece, it is there.
The challenge is that, while this is fine for financial transactions, how feasible is it for social media and, by extension, gaming?
Hive's Offering
Much of the first year was spent on scaling the Hive blockchain. This was an important step for a couple reasons. Naturally, it enhanced the amount of traffic that can be processed. We saw a great deal of increase in the numbers due to the explosion of @splinterlands. However, the blockchain did not even hiccup but for one situation, which allowed us to further scale the potential.
Thus, we see having the potential to really handle a large number of transactions, something that is vital for social media activity. It also made it less expensive to operate.
Which bring up another factor and one that is crucial in the discussion. Hive is a fee-less blockchain. Notice it does not say free. There is a cost to being involved yet it is not on a transaction basis.
Anyone who wants to use the Hive blockchain needs to have some stake. Obviously, when one first gets involved, this is not likely to happen on a large scale. People will not want to buy some Hive and stake it simply to test out a social media application.
Here is where delegation enters the picture. For newer people, the ability to transact is provided by the application. A small amount of HP is delegated to give people some basic functionality on the chain.
There is also work being done on having a Resource Credit Pool where people who have excess are able to allocate their RCs, allowing others, likely applications, to get access to what is needed.
Combining this, we do not find too many blockchains that offer this type of package.
Solutions Not Hype
This is the key going forward. There are a lot of projects that receive a great deal of hype. In the end, none of that matters. Sure, it provides some short run boost to the price of the token. However, over the long term, this will not suffice.
We are looking at providing an alternative to the present system. To achieve this, we need to provide solutions, not hype. People must be able to find the applications that suit their needs while offering more than what we presently see on the market.
As described above, it is becoming evident that decentralized social media is required. People need a place they can post their videos and text, without fear of it being censored or having their entire digital lives wiped out with the click of a button.
This is very valuable in this era. Each day, we see more people ostracized by mega-tech. Regardless of what they are espousing, the key is to ensure their right to say what they want. That is freedom. Again, this puts the onus upon us as content consumers to determine what is valid versus what is complete garbage.
Since the need is there, the applications have to be built. This harkens us to the overall focus of this article. Where are developers going to create all of this? What blockchains are suitable to provide the scale that is required, no fees per transaction, and true account ownership?
When we view things through this lens, we see how the list gets rather short. Certainly, there could be hybrid situations built where a decentralized blockchain is used for some of the activity, with much taking place on a server. This, of course, does create a situation where some of the same vulnerabilities exist. While it is likely a step forward, it is only a partial solution.
Hive has the capability to provide the entire solution. It is one of the few choices to build decentralized social media upon.
Few others can meet the requirements. With what is being developed, specifically SpkNetwork and the application by the Leofinance team, we are going to see some social media offering emerging that can truly start to compete with what is presently out there.
Hopefully, from there, things only start to snowball for the decentralized world.
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So much yes. I blog a lot while offering little to the ecosystem outside of some of my digital artistic endeavors. So I'm working on that personally. That said, I've been actively exploring other web3/dApp systems and I've found that...you really have to dig around to find dApp projects. This kind of surprised me honestly, I thought it would be easier to aggregate a list of decentralized apps, but maybe not since it is an entirely new space. As an example, I did a deep dive on Algorand (and I plan on looking at Cardano and Solana soon) and I never found a single place/site that acted as a unified list of Algorand dApps.
100%.
HIVE has all these front ends and awesome projects and games, but the average normie user I feel is still somewhat clueless as to what exactly is going on in the background. That's fine, the average user of the internet is also clueless as to what goes on in the internet background.
A part of me wonders how you could promote the idea of HIVE, showing all the cool dApps available, teaching a new user where to look for them and how to use their keys, without overwhelming them. It would be great if there was some sort of knowledge push for HIVE. I'm not entirely sure how to do it, how to teach the general public about decentralized back-ends when they don't even know what a back-end is to begin with.
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Personally I think it is a one app at a time deal. Get them interested in what suits them and let them expand from there.
The mistake we make is we try to hit them with the back end stuff who, like you said, they dont care about or overwhelm them with all that is here. Instead, give them what is most appealing to them and add as time goes by.
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Agreed
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I find it ironic that Jack would even suggest decentralized social media... after all, Twitter censored the president of the United States. Come on, who is he trying to kid?
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Yeah well I think it is all talk. That is what they do, keep up the rhetoric while amazing millions more.
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LOL
Jack Irony Dorsey
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Surely you talked about hype not being the solution, rightly so. Yet it feels that hype is a srategy that sells adoption. Hive isn't even evenly hyped not to talk of being hyped properly. At the end of the day it can become that application with even better prospects that would not disappoint whatsoever
Hype is worthless. Ends up as a collapse.
@splinterlands is a success story without hype. Yes it is gaining in popularity due to development, building, marketing, and word of mouth.
That is what it takes. And hyping Hive isnt going to do much other than, maybe, get bloggers attention. We need more applications that are suited to what people want to use.
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Definitely right about Splinterlands, its a sucess story that self advertises itself. Even non-gamers Wants to join in on the thrill
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I have checked some other decentralized social medias, but they do not offer the potential which HIVE offers to us.
I havent checked them out but thanks for your feedback.
For some reason, I am not surprised at your findings. It is tough to provide something that meets the needs of people, especially when the underlying blockchain has the issues I mentioned in the article.
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Even though decentralized social media is just scratching the surface of what I think Hive can offer society, the importance of a decentralized, community-owned means of communication. We already have blogging, I'm reeeaaally looking forward to microblogging, video, audio and images.
Microblogging should get a nice kick forward when we see what the Leofinance team releases.
SpkNetwork should enable the other features you mentioned.
It will be an interesting year.
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Yep, tokenized microblogging would huge. I wonder if anyone is working on that… and Wen will they release it. I hope Soon.
😉
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Feeless block chains are hard to maintain since it means that there needs to be a way to subsidize the cost of at least running the chain. HIVE does this quite well since Witnesses are paid for their work while the normal users don't need to worry about things. At least, HIVE is the only one I have seen so far that is truly fast and feeless. I don't count WAX since you need to pay for memory or space (RAM).
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Good points.
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I personally think as Hive gains more and more traction across the board were all probably in for a big surprise in the not so distant future. Thanks for sharing your insights. 👍
I would agree. We need to see a spreading out of things over the longer term. Right now we are still in the development stage. Over the next half year, we will likely see the rollout of many things that will radically alter what is taking place. I expect a different view on Hive by the industry shortly thereafter.
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So true, in a year's time I think blockchain dev will become the norm. Hive has a unique place in the ecosystem with it's social platform and layer 2s.
It. Could definitely be the place to be sooner rather than later
This is beautiful and I must say it is a step in our direction.
There are a lot of possibilities on hive.
For the fact that hive is feeless is one of the selling points.
Next is the security. Hive is secure.
We just need to be soldiers of hive in every and any way
We still need more applications. It will be interesting to see what is developed over the next year.
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Make sense tho...
We need more things that can be consumed on hive in my opinion
I don't know how much can Hive scale in comparison with Ethereum, but at least it's dirt cheap(basically free) to transact. The fees to withdraw a bit over $50 worth of USDT using the Ethereum network from Binance are $24. Sooner than later developers will hear about us and the situation will drastically change.
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Considering we are already far ahead of them, I would say we can do a lot more. Each time we encounter some issues, that is an opportunity to resolve some scaling hiccups which will only push the potential higher.
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Much, much more. Impressively so, and additional scaling capacity can be obtained by new hardware. Hive developers truly created a outstanding scaling solution.
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agree if we add a feature like a video chat it will soon surpass fb like social media but we need a lot of work for it to happen
Yes.... I keep advocating for DM/PM messaging and video chat to improve the appeal of Hive to a broader audience. Those are critical aspects of social networking that our ecosystem lacks.
Peakd already offers that through their front end at least the DM.
I do not believe too many people use it.
Video chat, see the comment I left above.
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agree we can do it but the service provider should make it private to himself as well
Does that have to be blockchain related though? Couldnt one set up an application to provide that service and simply use Hive as the log in?
Would anything end up on blockchain?
I am just asking because I cant think of a reason to tie that to blockchain.
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Yeah me neither, DM could be done off chain
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I agree if we want to make hive unique or get more users we can add third-party service video chat cause now almost all social media are adding it
Hive is future!
Well it certainly isnt the past or present so we can only work out tails off to make sure it is the future.
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Hive is the answer for sure.
We just hope we get the question correct.
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I posted on this same topic yesterday on @proofofblind (article here). Thanks for this post and a second perspective on the issue.
I think one of the things we need to consider is cross linking functionalities between various chains (something I believe Polkadot is designed for) such as Citycoin and their Smart City platform (a bitcoin side chain with smart contract capabilities) and perhaps Hedgehog and Nexo for investment and income building.
I love your mention of Resource Credit Pools, I have been thinking along similar lines after an earlier article you wrote discussing SIP's. There are ways to make access and utilization easier for the general public and giving new members a leg up on actualizing the potentials of Hive. I also agree that Hive is uniquely suited to provide the best possible social networking / media portal to the metaverse particularly if we can cross link with other systems (why reinvent the wheel?). Another good potential 'ally' (cross link) would be the Brave browser. There is a two way promotional advantage to having a Hive extension for Brave that could link BAT crypto to the Hive Engine and vice versa.
What I believe is needed is a community dedicated to creating teams from our membership, helping them to take good ideas and turn them into working projects. This would give us a necessary organizational structure with the transparency and community input needed to preserve the core ideals of Hive.
Thanks for a great post.
Blessed be.
Crap...still trying to master formating in posts and comments. Editor could be better.
My post link is https://peakd.com/engagement/@proofofblind/life-the-univers-and-almost-everything-submission-0006-to-proof-of-blind
We will see more interoperability and cross platform integration. That is one of the ideas of SpkNetwork.
As for the RC Pools, that is being coded I believe and should be in the next hard fork (but do not hold me to that).
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OMG!!! How lucky you were to buy Hive, Spk, Cub, POB and Leo in 2021
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Mirror is the one that I just saw that they are building on ETH. I wrote about it a little bit in my last post. I just can't see how that is going to be workable until they get the whole PoW thing behind them. It is just too much overhead for the common user to deal with it.
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The developers will get a lot of money. That is most like the best thing for them.
Whether the application is useable tends to be secondary.
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Sad, but often true
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There is no option remaining except decentralization. it will be the future.
rehived.
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Hive has a lot to offer and people can build onto it. Noting that I just found LOOPR on the Terra Network which is a dpos educational/financial blog for the DEX Looper.
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@taskmaster4450
This may be more a 'web4' thing but I think the following ideas might be worth exploring.
Full nodes operating on satellites in space or balloons in the upper atmosphere. Blockchain based operating systems. Lite nodes that can operate on phones, raspberry pis and other small devices. Utilizing existing technologies like data over HAM radio to reach those without the convenience of traditional internet access. Custom built hardware that is just 'plug and play' would be the general idea there.
Basically incorporating both hardware solutions and software solutions instead of just software solutions.
(Edited for clarity and so I can tag you because I did not realize this was an old post.)
Yes, indeed our time is coming, as more and more people come here attracted by Splinterlands, Leofinance, Cubfinance …you name it. Hive is a solution to this question. Now we have to get our name and description out there in front of people, so they can reach the same conclusion.
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Okay.
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