Because we are spied on by every single social application that sells our private data or curates our public content to better control what we see and what we hear, we felt the need to investigate on viable alternatives to current social media. The question motivating this series of articles is the following: If we had to move now, forced or not, from Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, etc. to a similar solution that fully respects our free-speech and our privacy, where would we go? For reasons that will be explained in detail, we believe that the only answer to deliberate privacy violation, hacks and censorship are decentralized social media. Before starting our study of the relevant alternatives to current social applications, this first article focuses on the basics: What do “centralized”, “decentralized” and “distributed” really mean? What are the outstanding types of decentralized alternatives and what are their specifics?

1 – Centralized vs Decentralized vs Distributed

It has been 10 years since Bitcoin was invented and 20 years since Napster appeared and there is still a lot of confusion surrounding what a decentralized network is, what a distributed network is and how they differ from centralized infrastructures. Don’t look for the right definitions on Quora or StackExchange though, the answers are completely wrong (and it’s a shame). Let’s rather clarify things for good with the help of Wikipedia and Vitalik.

1.1 – Conceptual Premise: Network Control

A network is said to be centralized when “a central controller exercises control over the lower-level components of the system directly or through the use of a power hierarchy”. To visualize this simple concept, we could picture a pyramid-like chart in which rules would flow from the top to the bottom. Twitter is centralized because one company owns the infrastructure (servers, software, …) that controls the whole network. Every information has to be validated by the “top” in order to be enjoyed by the “bottom” (top-down control). A decentralized network is the opposite of that since the validation emerges from the agreement between multiple entities. Using again the pyramid-like analogy, we could describe decentralized control by showing information flowing from the bottom to the top. The control is not vertically exerted in a direct way anymore, but rather emerges organically, through the collaboration and aggregation of peers (for example, Peer-to-Peer networks). As described on Wikipedia, who bases its explanation upon Bekey (2005): “This form of control is known as distributed control, or control in which each component of the system is equally responsible for contributing to the global, complex behaviour by acting on local information in the appropriate manner. The lower level components are implicitly aware of these appropriate responses through mechanisms that are based on the component’s interaction with the environment, including other components in that environment”.

1.2 – Structures of decentralization

Understanding the difference between centralization and decentralization through the prism of control is essential because this dichotomy somehow sums all the other aspects of decentralization (peers/nodes hierarchy, how the information flows, etc.). Those aspects form various degrees of (de)centralization, a spectrum delimited by the rather idealistic centralized/decentralized polarity. Vitalik Buterin has an interesting take on this matter in a paper where he draws three ways of controlling a network/system and describes how they affect global (de)centralization. The amount of physical computers affects the architectural (de)centralization, the amount of individuals and organizations involved in the network affects the political (de)centralization and how monolithic (or not) the network is affects the logical (de)centralization. In Vitalik’s theory, those three categories aren’t on the same level, they collide in a very specific way (see picture below).

In the above preliminary classification, we can see that BitTorrent is considered as being more decentralized than blockchain-based networks. The latter is “logically centralized” due to its global ledger preventing double spending. Debatable choice (because he omits the diversity provided by forks, bridges and sidechains) but you’ve been warned by its author that “a lot of these placements are very rough and highly debatable”. The whole taxonomy would actually need to go way beyond the numerical aspect of its categories to include what is partially addressed later in the “reasons for decentralization” (types of participants, distribution, costs and so on), but the idea that decentralization is not a Manichean concept is well expressed there.

The term “distributed“, on the other hand, rather refers to a purely technical characteristic of Peer-to-Peer networks. One talk about a distributed network when resources like data, processing, etc. are shared/spread among peers and nodes in order to accomplish a specific task, like to avoid loss of data, to increase processing power or bandwidth, to create a global ledger and so on. Distributing is decentralizing, but a decentralized network does not necessarily involve distribution (even if one can hardly find any useful example for this scenario). Furthermore, centralized networks sometimes use distributed networking to resolve performance issues or to secure their infrastructure. That’s why one should avoid using “distributed” when describing types or degrees of network (de)centralization. It is confusing at best and misleading at worst. For example, cloud storage services like Dropbox, Box or Google Drive are definitely centralized: these companies control how the information flows on their respective client-server architecture. However, their networks most probably have a distributed component in order to provide a sufficiently fast and secure service around the world. Should you trust these companies? No, their networks are centralized enough to allow easy and massive hacks and thefts. This does not occur with blockchain based cloud storage solutions like StorJ or IPFS because, as we will see in the next chapter, they mainly rely on complex data distribution and encryption.

Conceptually, decentralization counters the adverse effects of centralized control by giving every participant of a network the opportunity to choose how and when they provide information. Now, we will see what are the standing out models among decentralized social media networks and how they work technically to compete against current centralized social media.

2 – Federated vs Blockchain

There are currently two types of technologically ready decentralized social media alternatives: federated social media and blockchain-based social media. Both are based on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) technology, but they each behave quite differently around it. That is why we need to explain something important about P2P that most of you may not know. “Peer-to-Peer” means that each participant (peer) in a network acts both as a client and a server. Peers share their data to other peers (distribution) rather than interacting with a server who collect everyone’s data. Unfortunately, This type of infrastructure has two inherent technical limitations. The first one is that there is no such a thing as an “automatic discovery” of peers. Whatever P2P client you’re using, it will not scan the whole internet in order to detect who is participating in your network. In other words, if you want to connect to peers, you need to get their addresses first. The second one is that the data you may find one day could be unavailable the day after due to the fact that peers sometimes go offline, like you.

In 1999, Napster found a solution to overcome the first point. There was a central server to which each peer had to connect in order to retrieve the list of all connected users and their shared files. Then, you would download what you were interested in directly on each online peer’s computer. This obviously led to Napster being sued for hosting the centralized index. Fortunately, protocols evolved and P2P file sharing (like BitTorrent) resolved the two issues mentioned above. They introduced the concept of the tracker, which is basically what we call a Node. Like Napster’s central server, trackers centralize data about peers and files, but anyone can run its own. Also, files downloads aren’t anymore restricted to specific users and will be retrieved from all the known available sources. For a more detailed explanation on how trackers work, see this cool thread.

So, how do you build a social media using this technology? As of today, the most popular and advanced P2P social media networks are built upon ActivityPub, a W3C compliant protocol that provides a P2P communication model tailored for decentralized social media applications. Like file-sharing protocols, it works with two levels: peers are providing the content and nodes help peers to see each other. But social media require a few additional things compared to file-sharing:

Content needs to be available on the network as long as its author wishes. This means being edited or suppressed at will and be accessible even if they are offline; Content needs to be available to whom its author wishes.

To allow those features, the ActivityPub protocol gives more power to the nodes. They act as “supertrackers” by hosting all the addresses (tracker’s way) and all the files (peer’s way). Peers typically send their content to a node (eventually called hub, pod, instance, etc. depending on the application) which makes it immediately available to all the peers connected to the node. When local peers (connected to the same node) participate in discussions with external peers (from other nodes) or simply subscribe to external peers’ content, their node push that content to the relevant other nodes and eventually makes it available to all the other connected peers. That selective node-based distribution creates, inside the global network, a more or less extended local aggregation that is called a federation. Federated social media have a lot of positive aspects:

They are rather fast.

They are mostly free.

Peers can set up very specific permissions for their content.

They use a proven technology driving an already massive adoption.

Some drawbacks, however, are:

Information is spreading in a quite limited fashion, so you’re unlikely to see everything.

Networks are still vulnerable to hacks and thefts of nodes data due to the lack of encryption.

Blockchain-based networks manage the content discovery issue differently. P2P is still used to submit data to the network, making the discovery of peers similar to what we described above. However, blockchain nodes automatically broadcast to their list of nodes all transactions they receive from peers and other nodes. Those transactions get eventually picked up by mining nodes and added to the global ledger. Blockchain technology is made so all the network’s valid data is guaranteed to be constantly available once it has been processed by mining nodes. Hence, there is an important difference between blockchain and federated P2P infrastructures regarding data curation. In a blockchain-based network, the same rules for validating information are shared among all the nodes (you need to fork in order to propose another network with different rules) while in a federated P2P network, different rules may be enforced on a per-node basis. The use of a unique and unforgeable ledger created by and accessible to all the network adds some new properties to the more classical peers/nodes way adopted by federated P2P protocols. If we split those properties into pros and cons, the main global ledger’s pros would be:

There is no dark areas or isolated data.

Processed data can’t be removed or altered (tamper-proof).

Economical features right out of the box.

Main cons, on the other hand, would be:

You need to build a permission system requiring full data encryption capabilities. Otherwise, everything is available to everyone.

Rather slow (confirmation time).

Mostly not free.

No alteration or deletion also means that what you submit is there forever.

Technology still in its infancy, meaning small user base and slow adoption.

As you will see in our incoming comparative, blockchain-based social media overcome some of these cons in various ways, like transmitting the IPFS hash instead of clear data or borrowing some features from the federated concept to overcome issues related to speed and operation costs.

Below is a summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the three main (de)centralization types we studied in this article.

Centralized Federated Blockchain-Based Network Discovery XXX XX XXX Security X XX XXX Privacy X XXX XXX Roles / Permissions XXX XXX X

Conclusion

This preliminary part of our decentralized social media alternatives series was made to give a basic and rigorous knowledge about the concept of decentralization in the digital era. You learned that the blockchain isn’t the alpha and omega of decentralization and that thinking the future of our social interactions appears to be a bit more subtle than looking for the highest possible number of transactions per second! Federated P2P protocols paved the way for technologically viable decentralized social media while the blockchain brings new technical, political and economical solutions that may accelerate the transition from our current mainstream consented digital servitude to an unbreakable, limitless, fair and accessible digital freedom. What are the best decentralized social networks to join right now? You’ll know everything in the upcoming Ep.2 of this series. Stay tuned!