The Future of Social Media: Decentralized Social Media Platforms

I'm a 21 year old full-stack software developer who's currently working remote. I've been coding since I was in high school and I absolutely love software development.

Recently, I've been learning blockchain, specifically the Ethereum blockchain and the potential benefits of leveraging blockchain for decentralized applications.

The Problem:

With the recent talks about the power of big tech companies and the growing concern over a large portion of technological power being consolidated within the hands of a few organizations, I think this is a potential market.

One of the largest issues that have been talked about in the public square is the role of social media companies in moderating content on their platforms that they find against community values of the platform. This has caused a number of battles in the political/cultural arena in regards to what individuals feel like should or should not be allowed on platforms.

In response to this, a number of alternative platforms have risen up to provide a platform for those who dislike the traditional social media platforms. With this, we've seen the rise of alternative apps, however I believe that this has created an entirely new issue. In seeking to provide a platform for those who feel like they don't have one on traditional social media sites, it seems to me that these alternative platforms have branded themselves as a platform for people who exist on the fringes of mainstream platforms. I believe that this also posses an issue because it amounts to less idea exchange, creates echo chambers, and unnecessarily separates people into segmented platforms which may or may not be beneficial to the community at large in terms of user input to create better technology as well as services that companies can provide. This also requires more technological resources and time to be put into create these platforms that could be used to further technology elsewhere, to serve what I see as essentially an artificially created market.

The solution:

To create a decentralized social media platform, with solid UX design, modern & innovative tech features that help to drive the further development of technology, and that places more power into the hands of communities and users.

My vision for technology is democratization of the power into the hands of communities and individuals, instead of large tech companies. I'm not saying that platforms moderating/removing users and content is wrong, I'm saying I believe that power should be in the hands of the community and the individual to decide the type of content they see and that users of social media platforms should have more power over their own data as well as have a greater input into the features that platforms should adopt.

I think blockchain has the potential to help address this issue, specifically with decentralized application architecture. I've been on Indie Hackers for a while now and the absolutely awesome ideas that I've seen people build on here have convinced me it would be a good idea to build this project in public.

I will share regular updates and would love feedback/ideas from the community as I embark on this journey in public.

Phase 1 of this journey will be to validate the idea to check how it will be received by the market, I've been working of the landing page for a couple days now and will release it as soon as it's ready. I plan to advertise the idea and create a newsletter around the ideas mentioned in this project, as well as the potential benefits of leveraging blockchain technology in the realm of social media platforms, and sharing what I learn along the way.