Topic: Project Idea - Decentralized Twatter - page 2. (Read 569 times)

Most people are not using their head or thinking at all, they are just following the herd and repeating what other people said on TV, social media, etc.
I wouldn't consider people as bad or good, but it's obvious that only a small percentage is capable of making meaningful conversation and accept opinion of other people.
Making a true decentralized, unmoderated and usable social network is almost impossible (knowing human nature).

Well said @BlackHatCoiner. 

I think if an unmoderated message board reached a large enough audience and had a system that allowed upvotes/downvotes like the website I won't name, it could promote good conversation.  But unfortunately the message boards get overwhelmed by one side too quickly and they never reach enough people before turning into a spam fest.

I also recognize that most forums usually end up as a giant echo chambers because people want to hear/read what they agree with.

The majority of people are good - I truly believe that. The problem is we only hear from the loud ones who are usually not so good.

People often confuse or relate decentralization with free speech. It's free speech when everybody have the right to express their opinion and their opinion is well respected by everybody else. The latter doesn't and won't ever happen on a social platform that has no moderation and is in an uncontrollable manner, completely censorship resistant.

When you have the right to say anything you like, but there are a hundred people around you yelling to check their cool website, it stops being free speech. Let alone, when they'll start breaking the law.

In Bitcoin, free speech works with no censorship, because money talks; not people. I'm strongly in favor of decentralizing the current highly hierarchical system where a person knows the personal data of 2 billion people, but it must happen in a smart and efficient way. And I'm afraid the block chain technology alone isn't the way.

 The idea is excellent but it will be more excellent if the users don't need an account to sent messages. And if you design the platform like a dex where the user is only an address. Then it will be the top secured messageing platform. You have to design the platform likely that the personal messages will be hidden and only can seen by the selected address.  Where users can buy, stake and trade the coin but the platform will specially highlight messageing, sharing, and visiting the feed. The token structure might add rewards fund, marketing fund and other exclusive offers. Think something special.

You don't need to and you shouldn't use the blockchain of a cryptocurrency to post messages. As I said it should be built on top of that blockchain for example a bitcoin side-chain. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Sidechain
It could also solve the issue with price to some extent as the tokens on that side-chain will be pegged to bitcoin and mining of the coin could be performed by the same bitcoin miners (merge mined). In that separate chain the protocol can be anything you like because it is a semi-stand-alone blockchain so the transactions in that chain can cost whatever you want while it still needs bitcoin's security to operate.

Wow I have not seen this one.  This is very close to what I am looking for.  It claims to use blockchain technology for the backend and the front end is their website but they encourage you to build your own if you want to get around their moderation.

The difference in their project and my idea is they send the "peeps" to the blockchain while I want the blockchain to send the tweets/twats/peeps to the explorer and then the website. But the concept of using the data to build your own interface is spot on.

This is a good one, thanks for the message.

First thing, whatever name you choose, don't use "Twatter" 

The problem with every so-called decentralized no censorship no moderation project is that you're going to have to compete with spammers, I've just checked the link icopress posted and look at the last activity:
https://peepeth.com/new , it's a total spamfest.

Also interesting from their FAQ:


So they do censor and ban accounts....and yet...

The other problem is money, poeple will not want to pay money to post their views on the internet, and when you're going to incentive them to post bots will take over, bitcointalk was no exception, no project will be one.


And what would give enough value to those tokens to make them an incentive to either mine or post or host a node website?

If we talk about this kind of token one can't stop thinking about Chia, it started as a total hype,  scared every HDD producer or buyer in the world and it dropped 95% in 6 months since the launch, the older projects like Storj are still unable to break over they 2018 ATH, and "miners" are dropping like flies with 8-10$ payouts a month for 12TB, whatever value they have is because of poeple desperately holding them, not because of utility.

What is going to keep your tokens valuable since you're constantly printing them?

Anyhow, you can't have uncensored free speech without abuse, you can't compete with a free platform when charging poeple money, and the majority of the poeple on this planet will choose the most convenient and easy to use thing over whatever else you promise them. That's why we don't have yet a YT/fb/tw killer and there are slim chances there will ever be one.

Oh, and one more thing, you don't need a blockchain to have a decentralized website, it's not a must, sometimes I think it's actually a burden.

Check out this project, https://peepeth.com, it was launched about 4 years ago and functions to this day, (a social network similar to Twitter but based on the blockchain). Advertising in all its forms is completely absent. In addition, according to Peepeth, their back-end is open, they have no control over your account or content (although I would not say so given their claims that non-compliant messages are deleted by default). To be honest, personally, I do not see any particular advantages over the same twitter, but if you are interested, you can read more about peepeth here.
 

I think this is debatable because you could build the rewards (creation of new token) to change overtime depending on network use.  Example would be DOGE. It is low cost per token, secure, and low cost to send although transactions per second isn't huge. This is a whole separate discussion and since we are just throwing around ideas, its probable not worth debating right now.



This was my original question - How could you use existing blockchains to provide a decentralized version of twitter?  The https://memo.cash/ mentioned above does this but poorly.  I will look more into this option as I agree, this is probably the best option.  If I found a blockchain that is secure and cheap to send transactions, maybe I could build a website that reads all transactions in said blockchain and replicates a twitter feed using the messages in each transaction. Could even require the beginning of the message to have a specific key to remove transactions not intended to send message.

Example:
Alice sends x NMC to Bob with message saying "DECTWAT_message here"
Website displays new "tweet" (we need a better word) that is from Alice's address that may or may not be verified to read "message here"
Website does not display any transactions that did not have "DECTWAT" AND was over x NMC.

Thanks again for the feedback and discussion.

Does decentralization have to be similar to how Bitcoin works to be decentralized? I mean that broadcasting transactions in bitcoin is cost a lot, as the block that have one megabyte to 4 megabytes costs a lot of money, but the bitcoin network is profitable and tx files are small in size and do not need accurate synchronization, just as it happens in social media.

In short, the blockchain is not the ideal solution to create a decentralized social network as there are not enough profit returns, the problem of synchronization, the size of files, the nature of privacy and who can delete the data.


Nor you can’t create a free decentralized network that allows the user to fully access/delete the data and encrypt some of it so that no one else can see it.

Twitter, Instagram, ... all have dedicated clients, usually only for phone but sometimes desktop version also. If you are going to design a decentralized message platform it is best to keep everything decentralized.

Because you can't have everything. If people are supposed to use the coin to pay for their tweets then the price of that coin has to be low. You can't keep the price low, the market decides that. If it goes up, people won't be willing to post and if the price dumps the chain becomes insecure. The price has to be enough to create incentive for miners to mine that coin and if the difficulty goes up it has to go up to justify the increased amount of work they have to do.

Yes but doubly so for a new project that has a good chance of not gaining a high value.
Experience suggests that people aren't going to abandon what they are already using for free for a new platform that they have to pay for.
Low demand means low price and worst of all it means smaller market that is very susceptible to pump and dumps.

P.S. The only viable solution is to build such a project on top of an existing secure immutable decentralized blockchain. Like a bitcoin side-chain that is merge mined by same bitcoin miners.
There may be other solutions like using a different algorithm other than PoW that I can not think of right now.

Thanks for the feedback.


I know this can easily be done but the centralized website would be for normies to use with clean UX/UI. There could be hundreds of versions that fit each individuals wants. Think of a personalized twitter feed.



Why do you think the tokens (if structured the right way) couldn't drive incentive?  Each token is worth one message. This would have to be well thought out but it would eventually become a "pay-to-tweet" service which is fair because there has to be a small cost for the service. Just as there is a small cost to use any blockchain technology.


Isn't this a risk of any PoW chain?

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You said it exactly right, but this is a good thing, not a bad thing.  I think you missed the point. 

The user can choose how they use the platform.

The backend is the blockchain that allows a decentralized message system to function without third parties.  The front end is whatever you want it to be.  You can run a full node and verify all messages yourself or you can use someone else's website that does it all for you. 

There is incentive for people to create websites or platforms that read the blockchain because they can then make money on ads, subscriptions etc. 

There is incentive for people to use the chain for the obvious reasons that decentralized blockchains bring.

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I have seen this but we know that Twitter can't be trusted. Something like this would have to be built by the people for the people.

They are also going too big based on my research of this project - trying to make an entire social media platform.  The idea I am proposing is very simple.

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

Big idea = big money for advertising. Donald Trump failed)
I believe that you can create just thematic decentralized services, they will be in demand.

It's too vague in my opinion. "Public conversation" can easily be made decentralized, you just need two or more peers that connect to each other over the internet and communicate over an encrypted channel they create. This doesn't need any third party or even blockchain technology.
Creating persistence and immutability is the challenge and I don't see why would a company create such thing if they don't control the data or earn something out of it.

I think that Twitter is already working on making new decentralized social media called Bluesky, and they are recruiting developers and technologists for this work.
https://blueskyweb.org/

However, I would not trust big tech and twitter in making anything truly decentralized when we can see how they are handling censorship, and they would never allow people to have real control of their data.

One more interesting open source social media project is called Zion and it's based on Bitcoin and Lightning Network, without any ads, trackers, or algorithms.
With Zion you own your data and content, but one problem is that it's not free and you have to pay monthly membership.
Positive thing is that you can earn Bitcoin with your posts, so it's a interesting concept especially when it is censorship resistant.
https://getzion.com/

Check https://memo.cash/ which utilize BCH network. It's more practical than your idea since there are already incentive to run the node/mine the coin.

As pooya87 said, there isn't such thing, because of lack of incentive. In block chains, the users verify every single information they receive. How will this work in a “Decentralized Twitter”? Will they download every single message, image, video, podcast etc.? I hope you understand how impractical this is.

Either the users download the whole social platform in their hard drive or they have to use a third party. It's that simple.

It is trivial to create such a blockchain and you won't need a centralized website to see the messages, the full node can do this very easily by parsing the transactions and showing the message inside them to the user. Even a light/SPV protocol could be introduced for those who don't want to run a full node.

However, the problem is that you won't be able to keep the blockchain alive in secure and decentralized way. Simply because it lacks incentive.
For the ledger to be distributed and decentralized, people have to run full nodes which means they have to download and verify and store  the entire blockchain which is essentially lots of messages they don't want. If you add the "token" on top of it to create an incentive then the project stops being a message platform and becomes a payment platform where you can't post a message for free like you do on centralized alternatives like Twitter. It also adds the problem of "price", if it dumps nobody would mine that chain and the PoW algorithm becomes vulnerable to 51% attacks.

I have a project idea but I'm not sure if it is a terrible idea or if this is already being done, so I figured I'd post and let you animals decide.

TLDR; Use existing blockchain Blockchain (PoW crypto) that allows sending of messages publicly with each transaction to create a decentralized message system that allows centralized websites to easily show the messages by manipulating the block explorer in a feed or however else they desire i.e. decentralized twatter.



This platform would facilitate messages being sent by spending tokens through a PoW protocol.  No person or company would own or moderate. The block explorer, however could be filtered or moderated by each individual user or website.

It would work exactly like any other PoW consensus.  The protocol would allow sending and receiving of tokens and each transaction of tokens would include a message. Just like other protocols you can send a transaction to someone's address. This receiving address would now own the token.  They could then sell the token to a user who wants to send a message or send it as their own. Or even send a message during the sale.  Each transaction would have a new message but the old transaction would be publicly broadcasted on the blockchain.¹

Miners would be incentivized for securing the PoW protocol with new tokens which they could sell for cost of operation. Each new block of transactions would give a reward to the miner who finds the key plus fees for transactions exactly like bitcoin. Difficulty of mining would adjust as needed to keep blocks being mined on set frequency (1 minute?).

It should be easy for someone to set up a website to read all transactions just like blockchain.info and be formatted to a feed like twitter.  It should be easy to update from there for searches or even custom feeds from your followed addresses.  Different users could set up different sites for their own needs.  For example, one site may ban all messages that include certain words or phrases.  Some sites may ban nothing.  Some may only allow verified users on the feed.  You get the picture.

Addresses could be easily verified or banned on individual website.  Each website would be a centralized operation but the blockchain would remain decentralized.

This last part is the best part in my opinion. It allows for a truly decentralized place where anyone can share anything. Some things shared will be hateful and disgusting of course, but because it is open sourced on the blockchain, it will be easy for certain words or addresses to be filtered out on individual websites that read the blockchain.  Each individual can have their own twitter with their own rules.  This will lead to the best content getting the most views and the worst content being hidden by design because most people are good people and do not condone hate speech or ignorance.  



Are there any projects like this?

Could a similar website like blockchain.info be set up to read all messages from a blockchain already?

Thanks for any and all comments.



1: The transactions in theory would not need a minimum amount, but this would be abused of course, so a minimum limit must be created to prevent spam. Other forms of spam prevention would obviously need to be implemented like maximum transactions per time, maximum length of message, etc.  A sliding minimum amount per transaction that updates every X blocks based on some other variable may be useful here i.e. the more you send the more expensive it gets and then resets after some time.