Tips for Musk: How to create a decentralized version of Twitter?

The original author: Preston Bybne, partner of the well-known law firm Anderson Kill

Compilation of the original text: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

Compilation of the original text: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

Musk won.

On April 25, Twitter and Musk reached a final agreement. An entity wholly owned by Musk will acquire the company at $54.20 in cash per share. The total transaction value is about $44 billion. After completion, Twitter will become a privately held company. Of course, although the acquisition has been approved by Twitter’s board of directors, it is still subject to shareholder and applicable regulatory approval, as well as other customary closing conditions.

In short, Twitter has been included in Musk’s pocket. According to his previous promise, he will carry out a number of reforms such as open source algorithms, solving the problem of fraudulent robots, adding editing functions, and strictly abiding by freedom of speech. One question is: how to build a "decentralized social media".

Just as Bitcoin tokens freed us, we can actually use a similar infrastructure to run social media apps! Technically, at least a proof of concept is possible. In fact, as early as 2014, Casey Kuhlman, Tyler Jackson, and I proposed a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) called "Eris", which can basically be regarded as a "distributed version of Reddit", capable of Blockchain backend (Ethereum POC 3 to be precise), as shown in the following diagram:

If you look carefully, there is a "My DAO" button in the upper right corner, and the idea of ​​DAO at the time also made many people feel crazy.

While the prototype was nothing in 2014, when the crypto market was so immature, it was almost impossible to tell the difference between smart contracts and "pop pies" (just kidding), what do people think of as "DAO" is a topic of Confucian discussion , and now the situation is completely different. Given my experience in the bitcoin/blockchain space, and considering a lot of VC money is floating around in the space right now, it's really tempting to build a product before raising a $20M pre-seed round. However, after one startup, I've sworn off my attempts to build or sell software, so I'll just stick to my law firm. (Chain catcher's note: Preston Bybne is a partner of Anderson Kill, a well-known law firm)

To be honest, it's definitely easier to design a prototype than it is to design something that people actually want to use. Even in the simpler world of "Web 2" technologies, there are thousands of social media applications, but only a handful of them end up being successful. Creating a social media app is easy, but running a successful social media business is incredibly difficult.

Frankly speaking, there have been attempts to build "decentralized social media" before, but the effect does not seem to be very good. The most successful attempt so far may be the free open source social networking program Mastodon, although it's not perfect and individual instances of it don't scale well (as Donald Trump's social media Truth Social was trying to do, before they imitated Mastodon to try to go shortcut to social media stardom and found that Mastodon's backend couldn't handle their traffic).

For the same reason, if you want to store everything in plaintext like Bitclout does, and dump every communication to the blockchain, it's not that hard, but there's the problem - scalability suffers. Facebook doesn't need to agree on a global state, and they also delete data (By the way, Facebook generates over 4 petabytes of data per day). Any social media system that tries to imitate Bitcoin (like Bitclout) cannot put data on-chain, otherwise it will end up being stored on a handful of nodes running in a data center (it's a lot like Ethereum, isn't it? ?).

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1. Illegal content

First is the legal issue.

As it turns out, social media companies are bound to be subject to a range of regulations, such as data privacy laws, and others (some uniform across the U.S., but others vary from country to country) that apply to Destruction and reporting of illegal content in the United States, copyright issues, data protection, and mandatory disclosure of subscriber records. All of these factors need to be considered in the design of any "decentralized" social media application.

Lawyers have long cited the issue of illegal content as a major barrier to adoption of decentralized storage solutions.

In the U.S. and around the world, the most prevalent illegal content is what law enforcement refers to as child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and knowingly hosting such content carries severe penalties, such as hefty fines and long prison terms, a long-standing concern in the crypto industry. Responses to Internet issues seem to have been paid little attention, and some have been completely ignored. In contrast, Web2 applications that host user-generated content, such as Reddit, Twitter, or Facebook, take a very proactive approach to such illegal content.

Both centralized service providers and blockchain node operators are considered "providers" (a term meaning "electronic communication service provider") by US federal law, and they are required to destroy illegal content in accordance with the law . Facebook and other companies use a variety of software, including Microsoft's PhotoDNA, to automatically detect, remove, and report illegal content.

But as far as I know, many blockchain-based services, such as StorJ or Sia, have no such controls (or only have very limited controls), and these blockchain services allow encrypted data to be stored without creating user records, It also does not require the service provider (in this case, the node operator) to be able to determine the data stored or assess the legality of the stored data.

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2. Intellectual property rights

Likewise, the intellectual property system is not well suited for use in a decentralized manner.

Social media node operators would act as "content service providers" and would thus be "entities that transmit, route, or provide connectivity for digital online communications...material selected by users without modifying the content of the material sent or received ’, in particular the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which states that these social media node operators must consider:

(a) registration with the Copyright Office is necessary to be protected by the safe harbor of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act;

(b) handle hosted material with care that may give rise to claims of copyright infringement

At the very least, addressing this issue may require implementing the DMCA notice and takedown process protections for any third-party content hosted on nodes (which would involve node operators needing to make their case to the Copyright Office if they want to make a profit ).

To make matters worse, we may see some "copyright trolls" seize the copyright loopholes of social media node operators, and then sue them for profit, because if they are copyright sued, they are likely to lose money in the end-this is also the case for some Most common thing for vexatious copyright enforcement law firms.

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3. Data Protection and Disclosure

Another issue arises when a person participating in a decentralized network may obtain large amounts of user data in the course of operating his or her node—data protection and disclosure.

For example, in a decentralized social media system, the network will allow users to download user profiles and posts. Assuming I follow @A16Z and @marmotrecovery follows me, @A16Z will be allowed to download and store my messages and posts, and the messages and posts of everyone who follows me, including @marmotrecovery. Judging by @A16Z's sheer number of users (half a million), it's safe to say that if A16Z were running a node on this hypothetical network, they'd probably be a "provider of service" under the California Consumer Privacy Act or other local laws business” and may need to implement a compliance program.

For the same reason, node operators may also become "electronic communications service providers" under the U.S. Stored Communications Act (18 USC § 2701 et seq.), and thus may be required to turn over records on their computers to the government without Governments are authorized first - at least to the extent that those records relate to third parties owned and controlled by node operators, but it's unlikely that users would want to run a network that would lead to intrusion into their personal lives. Therefore, decentralized social media needs to be designed so that as little as possible third-party data is kept on the nodes.

Finally - some rough conclusions about the design of future decentralized social media networks

It seems that decentralized Twitter is unlikely to use blockchain infrastructure.

Content removal and moderation will be one of the most important factors in the design of any decentralized social media system, and ironically, the unfairness of content moderation in Web 2.0 is also one of the reasons driving the creation of Web3 decentralized social media. At the very least, the centrality of content moderation to the social media user experience means simply dumping everything on the blockchain, as Bitclout has done.

On the other hand, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) also believes that censorship is a major problem and expressed the hope that blockchain technology can fix the "broken model" of social media. He believes that traditional social media platforms are a very Confused system, no interoperability between different platforms, like can't see tweets on Facebook, Whatsapp can't read messages on Facebook, even if it's the same company's product. SBF proposes that different social media platforms can draw information from the same underlying data and conduct independent review. Use this to help solve the problems that plague social media while creating a level playing field.

However, the first truly successful "decentralized social media" system won't try to be a world computer that can sing and dance, but will have participants replicate the absolute minimum amount of viable information that the network needs to function. When using a social network, perhaps the only thing a social network cares about is whether a particular piece of content is posted by a particular person, as for the "blockchain" part, if there is one, it should boil down to providing a registration with a username and associated public key, nothing more .

For the most part, the first successful decentralized social media service will likely limit the type of user-hosted data to plain text.

First, hosting only text written by users and possibly a select group of followers is a low liability claim from a criminal, copyright and data protection law perspective. Of course, hosted text would also be easier on bandwidth, and easier to P2P transfer.

Second, for the hosting of videos and images, simply because if for no other reason the large amounts of data involved would otherwise be "outsourced". At this stage, although many third-party platforms (Bitchute, Cozy, Odysee) have lax content review policies for video content, they can at least be "exempted from liability", and then solve the market gap currently served by organizations such as YouTube, and exempt node operations Responsibility of the provider for policing that content (especially copyright issues) - this is actually very useful.

To serve content, what a decentralized system needs to do is not to block external links to these services (blocking external links is a practice that both Facebook and Twitter participate in), but to allow users to operate through a whitelist of third-party content providers. /blacklist to control what others can see. In this case, decentralized social media will be another source of referral traffic to external websites (links).

Of course, the above understanding may also be wrong.

However, for this question, the simpler answer is more likely to be the right answer, so - the future of "decentralized social media" may be more like RSS than Ethereum.