NEAR Social: Building The Foundation of the Open Web - Source

Isn’t it quite ironic that in over ten years of blockchain technology being around, we’re still heavily reliant on web2 technologies? Show us a single web3 project that doesn’t use Twitter to share announcements or an NFT project that doesn’t host their community on Discord.

Of course, there are good reasons to use these tools. The audience is large, and the platforms are intuitive (ok, except for discord). Everyone and their grandma a can figure out how to use Facebook. When Elon bought Twitter, some hoped things would improve. Unfortunately, anyone who’s recently been rugged on a Twitter space or retweeted by an army of bots will be able to confirm that systemic issues due to centrilsation are as present as ever.

1. While Polygon has Lens Protocol and Ethereum has Mirror—on NEAR, a team of devs is quietly building out NEAR social, a crucial part of enabling the user-owned Open Web.
2. Existing Web2 social media platforms (like Twitter) have a single point of failure, raise privacy concerns and don’t allow users to own their data, which is monetized. On the other hand, decentralised social networks like near.social aim to provide solutions for these problems through peer-to-peer networks for social interactions, content creation and distribution.
3. In essence, NEAR Social offers a new platform for innovation, with widgets that can be combined, forked and created by anyone. Users own their data and developers can easily access public data to create their own apps. near.social has over 1400 registered profiles and is a space that brings together the brightest minds in the NEAR ecosystem.

A Decentralised Social

Broadly speaking, decentralised social networks (DeSo) are peer-to-peer networks for social interactions, content creation, and distribution. They enable users to protect their privacy while enhancing data security through decentralised storage. By doing so, decentralized social media aims to protect users from exploits and malicious use of their data: when every transaction is on-chain, it becomes a lot harder to try and sell user data to advertisers. DeSo platforms are also censorship-resistant and open to anyone. Users won’t have to fear being banned or de-platformed by accident, as seems to often happen these days. While Polygon has Lens Protocol and Ethereum has Mirror, on NEAR, a team of devs is quietly building out NEAR social, a crucial part of enabling the user-owned Open Web.

A bit of background on NEAR social

NEAR social didn’t start natively on NEAR. Its first iteration lived on Mastodon, an open-source software for running self-hosted social media sites. People could use their near wallets to connect and interact with each other. However, Evgeny and the team driving NEAR social quickly realized that this wasn’t a long-term solution as it still had a single point of failure and was not censorship-resistant.

From creating a database to host social interactions (SocialDB), the project eventually evolved into an open space for people in the NEAR ecosystem to explore an open-source, decentralized alternative to Twitter.

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