Decentralized Social Media

Social media are platforms for users to share content that they generate in virtual spaces where they are connected to a subset of platform users with whom they have some social affinity. Centralized social media are having trouble wrestling with the problem of censorship and people are quite rightly alarmed by the power of companies with immense central control of public discourse and socializing.

Instead of entrusting the administration of the virtual public square to a centralized authority, some users are trying out new decentralized approaches to social media like Minds, Mastodon, and LBRY where a peer-to-peer network and a blockchain provide user-operated services to compete with the centralized behemoths like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube.

How is decentralized social media relevant to the Network State?

Social network members are not united in the way that startup societies/network societies are joined by a common sense of purpose. So web3 social networks are not likely to become network states. But they are a model of people cooperating to support a blockchain to take power back from a central authority that is not doing a good job of maintaining a public space, providing a model for people to do the same in the case of government.