#fExit Campaign to Raise Awareness of Blockchain-Based Social Networks

Sometimes cultural revolutions can be sparked by a hashtag. Time has come to introduce another hashtag we shall wield in the war for the reclamation of the Web, our digital homeland. The blockchain community launches the #fExit campaign, aimed at diversifying people’s experience in the sphere of social networks.

Despite censorship and privacy breaches, it’s hardly reasonable to boycott Facebook when your business relies on it. But it is more than prudent to try and support alternative decentralized platforms for storing and monetizing content. Because they herald the social networks of the future.

#fExit: What Is It About?

The #fExit initiative is a continuation of the #ForkGoogle campaign against pressure from Google and YouTube on the blockchain industry.

Facebook is already notorious for tampering with users’ private data. But Since January 2018, Facebook started a censorship campaign against the blockchain community, blocking blockchain projects’ ads.

As Apple CEO Tim Cook put it in 2014, “When an online service is free, you’re not the customer — you’re the product.” This quip aptly sums up the corporate approach to its userbase. Facebook, Twitter, and every other centralized social network capitalize on their users but give nothing back. “Why doesn’t Facebook pay its users for their incredibly valuable data?” Mark Zuckerberg was asked during his congressional testimony. A fair question that was never answered.

The main goals of the #fExit initiative are to reclaim the control over users’ personal information, transfer community management into the hands of their members, reward users’ intellectual work through algorithms, and work towards a fair distribution of monetization through ad revenue.

“We will continue to consistently support projects that create distributed alternatives to existing centralized services. In the future, this agenda will become a unifying factor behind the initiative tentatively dubbed Digital Cartel,” said Anatoly Kaplan, CEO of ForkLog.

Like #ForkGoogle, the #fExit campaign is designed to show that centralized video hosting and social networks are not our only options. The market is ripe with similar blockchain-based services, where discrimination against individual users and monopoly on content moderation are impossible.

The Alternative

Over the years we have seen a score of blockchain-based social networks, some of which proved to be fairly successful in the long run.

The most prominent mimic some features of their centralized predecessors but employ a more holistic approach to governance and monetization. Minds is reminiscent of Facebook. Steemit with its various offshoots (Golos, Hive) and Commun, a recent addition to the list created by the team behind Steemit’s Golos hard-fork, are more like Reddit but community-run and upvotes equal actual money. All.me was clearly inspired by Instagram but with a fairer model of content monetization. LinkedIn-like Indorse employs an elaborate system of decentralized consensus to validate each member’s skills. The list goes on.

In the coming weeks, forklog.media will endeavor to explore and review various decentralized social networks.

We shall pay extra attention to the three whales upon which the social network of the future should rest:

Protection of users’ personal data.

Resistance to censorship.

Fair monetization model.

Stay tuned.

This article is a part of our Occupy the Internet series, where we review the current trends in the nascent decentralized web and cover the burning issues of privacy and censorship.

Follow us on Twitter and Facebook and join our Telegram channel to know what’s up with crypto and why it’s important.