Introducing Afari: Social Media that puts you in control

Afari is a decentralized social media platform built on Blockstack.

Afari is a decentralized social media platform that aims to give you more control over your data and privacy and reward you for creating quality content that others enjoy.

Felix, Richard and I started Afari (formerly BlockX) in early 2018, while in our senior year at Princeton. However, after winning 1st place out of 300 teams from the USA and France in a student startup competition, turning down our offers from software giants and blockchain startups, and completing a summer startup accelerator, we’re now working on Afari full time.

In another post, we announced that the web version of Afari is in public beta. We’re writing this post to discuss the need for Afari and our vision for how Afari will solve its motivating problems of data privacy, censorship resistance and rewarding content creators.

The Need for Afari

Data privacy: Just the words “Facebook” and “Cambridge Analytica” are enough to tell you that there’s a problem with data control and privacy on social media. Structurally, this is because social media companies are centralized: They own our data, they store it on their servers and therefore they control who can access it. This leaves the users of these platforms having to blindly trust that the sharing of data without user consent won’t’ happen, but this was the precise cause of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Just the words “Facebook” and “Cambridge Analytica” are enough to tell you that there’s a problem with data control and privacy on social media. Structurally, this is because social media companies are centralized: They own our data, they store it on their servers and therefore they control who can access it. This leaves the users of these platforms having to blindly trust that the sharing of data without user consent won’t’ happen, but this was the precise cause of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Platform Censorship: Social media platforms are also politically centralized as they are the only parties that decide what content is allowed on their platforms. This may have been fine when Facebook was just for checking relationship statuses on college campuses, or Twitter was just about what you had for lunch, but now that these platforms have grown to billions of users, they function as a public utility of sorts for communication. People all over the world rely on these platforms for spreading ideas — the use of social media in Arab Spring revolutions and hashtag movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo show that social media is a powerful tool for activism and societal change. However, we are at the behest of centralized companies to ensure that our points of view has equal representation in the marketplace of ideas, as centralized platforms have the power of arbitrarily shutdown accounts for ‘violating terms of service’.

Social media platforms are also politically centralized as they are the only parties that decide what content is allowed on their platforms. This may have been fine when Facebook was just for checking relationship statuses on college campuses, or Twitter was just about what you had for lunch, but now that these platforms have grown to billions of users, they function as a public utility of sorts for communication. People all over the world rely on these platforms for spreading ideas — the use of social media in Arab Spring revolutions and hashtag movements like #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo show that social media is a powerful tool for activism and societal change. However, we are at the behest of centralized companies to ensure that our points of view has equal representation in the marketplace of ideas, as centralized platforms have the power of arbitrarily shutdown accounts for ‘violating terms of service’. Government censorship: On centralized social media all user data is owned by the company and stored on company servers. This leaves users susceptible to government censorship, because governments can force companies to handover data to them. This is a frequent occurrence with platforms like WeChat in China, with the most recent case being the Vietnamese government forcing Facebook to hand over user data.

On centralized social media all user data is owned by the company and stored on company servers. This leaves users susceptible to government censorship, because governments can force companies to handover data to them. This is a frequent occurrence with platforms like WeChat in China, with the most recent case being the Vietnamese government forcing Facebook to hand over user data. Rewarding content creators: Your posts are what all keep social media platforms alive and able to make money through advertisements. Yet, only platforms like Youtube allow their users to easily monetize their content — and only a small fraction of users are eligible for compensation, thanks to demonetization policies that Youtube centrally enforces.

Patrick Stanley of Blockstack on the benefits of Afari

Afari’s Solution: Decentralization

Data privacy: Afari aims to give our users more control of their data. We achieve this by not storing your information with us. Instead, information like your posts, activity and social graph are stored in a decentralized storage system that you own, thanks to Blockstack. Afari simply provides an interface between your storage and the storage of your followers & people who follow you.

Afari aims to give our users more control of their data. We achieve this by not storing your information with us. Instead, information like your posts, activity and social graph are stored in a decentralized storage system that you own, thanks to Blockstack. Afari simply provides an interface between your storage and the storage of your followers & people who follow you. Platform Censorship: Afari offers resistance against platform censorship, thanks to its architectural decentralization. Your followers can fetch your posts directly from your storage, in a peer to peer (P2P) manner, without going through any central authority. However, since P2P is slow for a high volume of posts, our Afari aggregator, which aggregates public posts on the network, will be open sourced so that others can verify that they are receiving their followers’ posts by running their own version. This means that you are the only person who can take down your posts and you can ensure that your voice is always heard in the marketplace of ideas. Moreover, since Afari doesn’t own your data and it’s kept in storage systems you control, governments cannot force Afari to filter posts through them. (Note that this is the case if those governments have jurisdiction to compel companies to hand over data, such as the case with Facebook and Vietnam above).

Afari offers resistance against platform censorship, thanks to its architectural decentralization. Your followers can fetch your posts directly from your storage, in a peer to peer (P2P) manner, without going through any central authority. However, since P2P is slow for a high volume of posts, our Afari aggregator, which aggregates public posts on the network, will be open sourced so that others can verify that they are receiving their followers’ posts by running their own version. This means that you are the only person who can take down your posts and you can ensure that your voice is always heard in the marketplace of ideas. Moreover, since Afari doesn’t own your data and it’s kept in storage systems you control, governments cannot force Afari to filter posts through them. (Note that this is the case if those governments have jurisdiction to compel companies to hand over data, such as the case with Facebook and Vietnam above). A note on governance: We use a decentralized governance mechanism to prevent unsavoury and illicit/illegal content from circulating on the network. In its first iteration, the mechanism involves individual users keeping a ‘block list’, containing users they have blocked. In contrast to Afari keeping a central list of people who are banned from the platform, individuals keep a list of users they believe to post unsuitable content. This allows each user to subscribe to block lists of people they trust, along with their own block list, to ensure that they’re not exposed to unsuitable content. We plan to add further measures such that the community, along with Afari, would have power to moderate unsuitable content on the platform.

Future Work

Rewarding content creators: In the future, we plan to cater to the market of digital content creators, by providing creators with an easier way to monetize: rewarding them with a cryptocurrency token for creating quality content on Afari. We aim to allow creators with any audience size, to be able to monetize their content through tips and subscriptions, as well as earning content rewards from a community rewards pool. We will release more information about this in the future.

Interested in learning more?

Sign up on the Afari website to be the first to hear about Afari updates and announcements. Also check out our talk at the Blockstack Meetup in NYC in August:

Afari Presentation at Blockstack Meetup in NYC

If you’re interested in our vision and you’d like to learn more about Afari, reach out to us at hello@afari.io.