Decentralized Social Media Explained - Why Businesses Should Care

Decentralized Social Media: What It Is and Why It Matters

In this video, Trent Canelli, a web 3 marketing strategist, discusses decentralized social media. He explains how traditional social media is centralized and controlled by a single company, which can lead to issues such as censorship and data breaches. Decentralized social media aims to give power back to users by breaking the system of control and allowing them to decide what content they want.

What Makes Decentralized Social Media Different

• Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter are all run by companies that are guided by their CEO.

• Decentralized social media gives power back to the internet's users by breaking the system of control.

• Traditional social media is centralized with a single company making all decisions about the platform for users.

Why Decentralized Social Media Is Interesting for Businesses

• Decentralization aims to give power back to users.

• Social media is an enormous driver of almost everything we do online.

• Spending time gathering data from social media sources affects how we think and react in our daily lives.

The Pros and Cons of Decentralized Social Media

• Decentralization aims to give power back to users but doesn't fix all problems with social media.

• Freedom of speech is possible on decentralized platforms because they allow splintering off from more centralized systems while sloughing off oversight from those systems.

• Content moderation teams have a hard time catching every issue on centralized platforms like Meta (formerly Facebook).

Overall, Trent Canelli provides an overview of decentralized social media and its potential benefits for businesses and users. He also acknowledges that it is not a perfect solution and has its own set of challenges.

Introduction

The lack of regulation on decentralized social media can lead to more extreme beliefs being adopted more quickly by more people. Decentralized social media is not inherently bad or good, but it's important to be aware of your environment and what you're getting involved with.

8chan and QAnon

8chan was a platform that touted free thought, but it became a place for toxic and politically harrowing things. Decentralized social media is not inherently bad or good.

• 8chan went from being an optimistic website to one that fomented toxic and politically harrowing things.

• The creator of 8chan has denounced the platform as well as its current owners who are believed to be behind the QAnon account.

Positive and Negative Effects of Decentralized Social Media

Decentralized social media has both benefits and detriments. It can be interesting for businesses because it allows for tighter niches, incentives for creators take on a different form, algorithms are open source, and selling to those people is easier.

• Decentralized social media allows for tighter niches which makes targeting organically much easier.

• Incentives for creators take on a different form in decentralized social media because people vote with their fingers.

• Algorithms in decentralized social media are open source which means there's no guessing about what's required to win on one of these platforms.

• Selling to those people is once again much easier because you've crafted that message to reach them organically.

Decentralized Social Media Platforms

In this section, the speaker discusses two decentralized social media platforms: DTube and Mastodon.

DTube

• DTube is a decentralized competitor to YouTube that requires users to give before they can get.

• There are two types of currency on DTube: YouTube Coin (DTC) and Voting Power (VP).

• VP is needed to take actions on the site like liking videos, uploading content, commenting, etc.

• With DTube's direct democracy, it's easier to see how voting power affects the virality of a video.

Mastodon

• Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform similar to Twitter.

• It has separate instances for niches and communities.

• The platform does not promote instances that support hate or toxicity.

• A comprehensive list of all Mastodon instances can be found on their website catalog.

Conclusion

In this section, the speaker concludes by discussing the importance of considering both the good and bad aspects of decentralized social media platforms when marketing on them.

• Businesses should market on platforms that do the best job of demonetizing hate while giving freedom back to their users.