Subsocial

Many of us signed up to Facebook unaware of what it meant to use a free product. There are always costs, so value has to be extracted somehow. Your data and your time is your payment. Had we known then what we know now, we may have chosen differently.

It is also important to acknowledge that while value was extracted by social media platforms of Web 2.0, the bigger story is actually a more positive one. Individuals could create content, share it with the world, and get paid without leaving their home.

Despite this freedom which we have to express ourselves and get paid for the value we create; we also know that the Internet is not as free as intended. 

Accessing the web, posting content, and receiving payment involves numerous service providers lurking the background. These service providers can block your content, halt your payments, or simply remove you from the platform entirely. Every service provider is a potential point of censorship. Each of them is able to extract value. 

Blockchain is technology for disintermediation. It is possible to remove the unnecessary service providers that stand between creators and consumers. We see an interesting paradox where blockchain technology is most valuable when it extracts as little value as possible from its users.

Facebook shouldn’t sell your data without paying you. YouTube shouldn’t get paid more for advertising than you do. Twitter shouldn’t be able to ban you or block your tweets because they disagree with you. 

This is why we have created Subsocial. A web 3.0 technology with the promise of data sovereignty. You control the data you create. Your content, your value. 

Subsocial is an open platform that allows anyone to launch their own decentralized censorship-resistant social networks and marketplaces. Subsocial will help you create your own decentralized version of the popular sites we see today, such as Medium, Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Discourse, Patreon, OnlyFans and more. 

Our software uses the Substrate blockchain framework and IPFS for decentralized file storage. This enables personalized news feed and notifications, transparent reputation, full text searching, rich content formats, without sacrificing SEO (search engine optimization). 

Using Substrate also allows Subsocial to connect to the Polkadot and Kusama networks. Polkadot is a next-generation blockchain protocol that unites an entire network of purpose-built blockchains, allowing them to operate seamlessly together at scale. Polkadot will provide cross-chain interaction as well as providing a shared security platform upon which Subsocial can scale whilst remaining secure.

This is social media unbounded.

Subsocial is more than a blogging platform with crypto payments. It is a revolution in connecting social media with decentralized finance. This is social finance where social media meets DeFi. To better explain how we differ from a simple blogging platform we must outline our architecture at a high level.

We will briefly cover topics such as where content is published and how it can be monetized via myriad primitives that we are working to add as soon as possible. This paper will also cover how we handle reputation and allow for a multitude of reputation types.

Subsocial saves you the hassle of running your own social network blockchain. Multiple social networks can run from the Subsocial chain which will provide shared networking effects. By default the network is censorship-resistant, however, each community is able to set their own rules for moderation.