A few weeks ago, I suggested that the solution to our content moderation problem is federation. Rather than continue a losing battle to get centralized technical platforms to improve the way online content is moderated, I would argue that we should be pushing these decisions to the edge of the network. In this way, servers can determine which other servers to connect to while allowing their users to remain connected to the global conversation. Federation was how the Internet was originally designed and it was also how I believed modern communication could be made to function.
But when I advocated decentralization, I knew it would never be a complete solution. Decentralized systems suffer from a number of inconveniences that, paradoxically, can only be solved by centralization. Which means that unless we take proactive measures to prevent this from happening, the current shift in favor of decentralized solutions will suffer the same fate as all previous attempts, as soon as the pendulum starts to swing back. Is. So, what might these measures look like?
In a recent white paper, Varun Srinivasan makes an argument for finding a balance between the highly centralized control that characterizes our online interactions today and the too much federation—which leaves out many of the features that users enjoy in their online interactions. Have been expecting He refers to this Goldilocks zone as “substantial decentralization”.
According to Varun, only three things need to happen for a social media network to be decentralized enough: (i) users must have the ability to claim a unique username; (ii) they must be able to post any messages under that username; and (iii) they must be able to read that message under any username. The first of these has so far been exceptionally difficult to establish.
In a centralized network, the name registry is controlled by the operator of the network. Names are usually given based on availability, which is why “good names” are taken by early adopters. This is how Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was able to secure for himself the extremely common @jack username. The trouble is, a centralized platform operates under the direction of the organization controlling it, and there’s nothing stopping it from denying you access to your username or, worse, handing it over to someone else. Given how closely our social capital is tied to our online presence, this lack of control over our online identity is unacceptable to many.
Federated networks have different problems. While users have more control over their usernames, they are a loose network of separately established instances and thus there is no way to consider a given username unique across the entire federated network. This means that in a decentralized network, your username is unique only on the server it is created on. Nothing prevents anyone from registering the same username on another server. Which means that no one can have a unique username in ‘fediverse’.
For example, even though I’ve secured the relatively generic @rahul username for myself on Mastodon, you’ll need to search for rahul@thinktanki.social to find me, because I’ve registered my username on the thinktanki.social servers. . This is what separates me from other Rahuls who had the good fortune to register themselves on the mastodon.social server.
For the unique identification of usernames on a federated social network, we need a decentralized name registry. This, until recently, was largely believed to be impossible. Varun suggests that we can change this by using smart contracts to create a decentralized name registry. Each new username can be appended to the one before it in the chain, which in turn serves as a common (yet decentralized) registry of names for all applications connected to the protocol. In addition, users have exclusive control over their usernames while still reaping the benefits of a federated network.
This idea is being built into a new substantially decentralized social network called Farcaster. By decentralizing usernames on-chain and post storage on the Farcaster Hub, it is possible for users to have a modern social-media experience with complete control over their online identity.
Farcaster is just one of many protocols and solutions that are being built to offer an online experience that is vastly different from what we are used to. Cumulatively, these platforms are being referred to as Web 3.0 – in contrast to the static web (Web 1.0) which allows us to read only uploaded content or the dynamic web (Web 2.0) on which users can create and consume content but do not actually own it—being envisioned as a decentralized and self-empowering network that takes control away from the platform and separates it Returns users.
If successful, these new protocols will create the online future we’ve all hoped for. Once we are able to trust blockchain, I can see us writing the first draft of history from raw facts directly to a distributed ledger, in the words of Balaji Srinivasan. Once smart contracts become ubiquitous, our laws will be written directly into code, interpreted by neutral servers and cryptographically enforced.
It is a completely different version of the Internet that we use today. Whether it is better or worse remains to be seen.
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