Overview
Decentralized Social Media (DeSo) refers to platforms that use distributed ledger technology to store social data. Unlike Facebook or X (Twitter), these platforms are not owned by a single corporation, making them resistant to centralized censorship and data exploitation.
Key Characteristics
- Censorship Resistance: Content cannot be easily removed by a central authority.
- User Ownership: Users own their handles, content, and social graphs (who they follow and who follows them).
- Interoperability: A user's profile can be used across multiple different applications built on the same underlying protocol.
Popular Protocols
- Lens Protocol: A composable social graph on Polygon.
- Farcaster: A sufficiently decentralized social network.
- Nostr: A simple, open protocol for global, censorship-resistant social media.