Original Author: Sneha Prajapati
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Why is decentralization important?
The capitalist world operates on the principle of obtaining more resources, which includes obtaining wealth from other people. While a centralized entity would lead to an uneven distribution of wealth and power, there is no doubt that this feature is undermining society today. In the 21st century, the gap between rich and poor is widening and 1% of the worlds people own 95% of the worlds wealth, thus creating an unbalanced society that is doomed to fail.
Decentralization, on the other hand, allows a system to evolve itself, with a feedback loop of participants and community members that is essentially the same as natural evolution. A decentralized system takes care of its own changing needs and relinquishes sovereignty to its participants.
Decentralization is important because:
anti-censorship
anti-censorship
Develop with open source
In the Internet age, the speed of technological progress is very fast, because the iteration cycle is very short.
A brand new internet-native technology requires some new rules, like allowing data to be shared, retained (on-device) or computed. But for private entities, the process takes place in a proprietary environment within the company, what we call a service provider.
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What is an agreement?
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Pros and Cons of Decentralized Protocols
These agreements need to be built by someone, and few people want to see their fruits taken away by the inevitable. In a decentralized network, rewards are distributed among its participants. On the other hand, service providers continue to make profits by building a centralized protocol and earning revenue from the data collected by its participants.
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What is a decentralized protocol?
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1. Avoid centralization
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2. Safeguard digital sovereignty
Data has been truly core since the dawn of the Internet age, yet most people are unaware of how their personal data generates value and is tracked, monitored, and sold to third parties unconsciously. But in web3, based on security requirements, data is not stored in a centralized database, and personal data will not be stolen and sold. Therefore, Web3 has great promise in terms of security, anonymity and privacy.
In order to solve the above two situations, web3 uses the protocol. They are low-cost public goods, which requires decentralized service providers to provide high-quality software performance without storing data. These service providers facilitate transactions through specific protocols to meet peoples various needs.
But this nascent technology has its own challenges:
They are difficult to change and run more slowly than centralized service providers. This is the result of a compromise, even though the centralized platform is faster and more convenient in some aspects, but the cost is too high, and we need to have digital sovereignty through the agreement.
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How helpful are decentralized protocols for society?
Important software projects in history were created with the help of communities of independent developers. When a project wins the attention of entrepreneurs and developers, it sparks further innovation and collaboration, resulting in a superior product.
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Source: Azulweb
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ownership economy
One of the amazing things we learn about technology that we consume or use every day is that it is largely built, operated, and even funded by its users. Much software, servers, and content on the Internet are based on open source code contributed by a global developer community. Platforms like Wikipedia, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Airbnb all operate around content and products from individuals, not companies.
As the role of individuals in value creation becomes more prevalent, the next direction of development is to design software that is not only built, operated, and funded by individual users, but also owned by its users. Ownership of employee stock options has been a powerful tool for motivating talented people to put their talents to use in building start-ups.
While this model has been very successful, not all platforms benefit from it, thus resulting in misalignment between platforms and users needs and goals.
Web3 is reversing this trend, bringing a new generation of platforms that thrive with contributions from a global talent pool. Credentials of ownership are a powerful motivator to develop quality products in a deeper way through idea proposals, computing resources, code or community building skills. The collaborative economy model helps platforms better align with users over time, allowing platforms to grow bigger, be more resilient, and be more innovative.
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Decentralization of web3 and cryptocurrencies
In the web3 ecosystem, there are multiple compound feedback loops involving developers of the core protocol, developers of the complementary encrypted network, developers of third-party applications, and service providers who operate the network. These feedback loops are further amplified by the incentives of the associated tokens, which, as we have seen with Bitcoin and Ethereum, can generate continued momentum for the cryptocurrency community to develop quality products.
Decentralized system or centralized system, who will win the next Internet era depends on who creates the most compelling products, which in turn will attract more high-quality developers and entrepreneurs. The big tech giants may still win, but the incentive mechanism based on encrypted tokens is pushing the entire web3 ecosystem towards decentralized products.
Decentralized platforms often launch half-finished products without clear use cases. Therefore, they need to go through two stages of product-market fit:
Product-market fit between platforms and developers/entrepreneurs.
Product market fit between platform/ecosystem and end users.
This two-stage process led many to underestimate the potential of decentralized platforms.
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decentralized social media
Social media facilitates communication, community building and knowledge sharing. People use social media to drive social and political change, bring awareness to important issues, raise funds for those in need, and help and promote their businesses. However, there is also an ugly side, including cyberbullying, political inaccuracies, and even criminal activity.
Current social media is built in web2, managed by centralized service providers like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These companies own user data, control the flow of data and create rules to benefit from it.
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A decentralized social network that allows users more control. Unlike centralized social networking platforms, federated networks promote independence without a centralized authority. Its benefits include:
carry censorship
Personal Data Ownership
Increase control over user-generated content
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joint network
In a federated network, no one group can dictate the rules of other groups. One downside of this structure is that groups advocating hate also have the freedom to launch their own social media sites. While these groups can be boycotted, they cannot be prevented from joining the network.
In a federated social network, users can create accounts that dont have to be tied to real-world identities, such as email addresses or phone numbers, to ensure their privacy and security. Additionally, these networks often rely on public-key cryptography to keep accounts secure, rather than relying on a single organization to protect user data.
But federated networks have their own challenges:
Data and connections are lost because there is no central server to store the data.
Unencrypted data leads to privacy breaches.
What is a social graph?
What is a social graph?
A social graph is a mapping of social relationships between individuals. Think of it like your phone contacts, which record a persons social connections. Or understand it with social networking apps like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn, where each account has a certain number of fans, followers, posts, likes, comments, shares, messages, etc. A social graph is the relationship between various data across multiple databases, which produces a graph.
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1. Relation: A data browser for multi-chain social graphs on Web3
Relation is a one-stop Web3 social application, which aims to break the dilemma of centralized social graph by building a personalized and visualized Web3 social graph for users and returning the ownership and privacy of user data to users. In the era of decentralized Web3, users have complete autonomy and permanent ownership of all their interactions. The combination and composition of applications has infinite possibilities, making the world more fluid and open.
The relationship between social graphs and users is no longer fixed and immobile. Relation Labs is trying to solve this problem with two different products:
1) Relation Link Toolkit
Relation is an open source, easy-to-use solution for blockchain DApps and community developers, and Relation One, a one-stop social application.
2) Diagram Toolkit
It includes open-source Relation Graph access API, Relation Dashboard API, modular social function components, and a multi-chain smart contract wallet solution for DApps.
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2. Cyberconnect: Infrastructure for building social graphs for Web3
CyberConnect is a blockchain-agnostic infrastructure that supports application development across multiple blockchains and allows Dapps to access and user-provided social graph data. But it is not developer friendly, which limits its scope to only a few applications built on this protocol.
Its social graph module consists of only two pieces of data:
1) Follow button
2) List of Followers and Followed.
Any Web3 application with a following function can easily integrate CyberConnect without worrying about losing your social graph data. CyberConnect is a social graph infrastructure for Web3 applications. Developers can plug social graph modules into their applications with simple code, just like Uniswap, which is a cryptocurrency exchange in Web3 applications. Default module.
CyberConnects social graph data storage is built with IPFS and Ceramic, and its gateway provides a common data layer for DApps to start plugging in social elements for their users. With CyberConnect, ownership of the social graph will be returned to the user. You will own your social graph on Web3.
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3. Lens: Aaves Web3 social network
Aaves Web3 Social Media Platform"Lens", plans to provide users with alternatives to Facebook, Twitter, and other online interactions. It is a permissionless, composable, decentralized social graph that makes it easy to build a Web3 social platform.
Their goal is to create a"Wonderful experience", and slowly expand this experience through the Lens protocol. The Lens protocol allows users to create their own NFT-based profiles, which means that users will own and control their profiles, rather than letting the platform change it as needed, and profiles will be able to store posts, fan histories, and more.
For example, when you follow someone, you are awarded a follow NFT. Each NFT has a unique token ID with inherent scarcity and utility.
Lens also has a feature that offers revenue sharing to users who post content on it. It can be anything from pictures to music to video or digital art. In turn, others can collect these publications from people they follow. Reposting a post can get the discoverers fee, and if someone finds the content through the users reposting, the original content creator can get"mirroring fee"。
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4. Polkadot & Project Liberty
The technical teams of Project Liberty and Polkadot have partnered to realize the vision of Web3, empower users, protect their privacy, and liberate the social graph from the control of web2 social media giants.
The technical teams behind Project Liberty and Polkadot will collaborate to implement the first decentralized social network protocol (DSNP). Their goal is to evolve this groundbreaking open source internet protocol into the core social layer of the next generation internet.
DSNP creates the foundation for a new digital age where social network users will be able to own, control and benefit from their personal data. The collaboration between Polkadot and Project Liberty, working toward the shared goal of a fairer, user-centric, and socially-conscious network, represents the next step in enabling high-performance, low-cost decentralized An important first step in the modernization of social networking.
DSNP is a core part of Project Liberty. Project Liberty aims to accelerate the worlds transition to an open and inclusive data economy, shifting power from platforms to people. Polkadot has a unique architecture that can implement DSNP on a large scale, and its economics will support A sustainable alternative to todays business models driven by regulatory economics.
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5. web3 digital authoring tool: Wordcel
This is a decentralized stack on top of Solana. Think of it as your Medium, Substack, ghost, web3 writing community where you will earn by writing online and earning platform tokens.
A fully decentralized web3 solution for writers with the following features:
A decentralized protocol without a centralized database means data autonomy.
There is no censorship, and no governmental, political or oppositional force can remove or alter your content unless you choose to do so.
Sovereignty over your content and distribution, you can host your publication on your own domain name, and you as the creator decide how it is distributed.
Wordcel is first and foremost a protocol, around which a tool ecosystem has been built for decentralized writing solutions. It provides users with the best writing tools, and you can publish from anywhere, whether it is Vim, VSCode, Notion, or any other custom editor.
