NEAR SOCIAL : BUILDING THE FOUNDATION OF THE OPEN WEB

A Decentralised Social

Broadly speaking, decentralised social networks (DeSo) are peer-to-peer networks for social interactions, content creation, and distribution. They enable users to protect their privacy while enhancing data security through decentralised storage. By doing so, decentralized social media aims to protect users from exploits and malicious use of their data: when every transaction is on-chain, it becomes a lot harder to try and sell user data to advertisers. DeSo platforms are also censorship-resistant and open to anyone. Users won’t have to fear being banned or de-platformed by accident, as seems to often happen these days.
A bit of background on NEAR social
NEAR social didn’t start natively on NEAR. Its first iteration lived on Mastodon, an open-source software for running self-hosted social media sites. People could use their near wallets to connect and interact with each other. However, Evgeny and the team driving NEAR social quickly realized that this wasn’t a long-term solution as it still had a single point of failure and was not censorship-resistant.
From creating a database to host social interactions (SocialDB), the project eventually evolved into an open space for people in the NEAR ecosystem to explore an open-source, decentralized alternative to Twitter.

Getting into NEAR social
On NEAR social users own their data, and developers can easily tap into the power of accessible public data to create their own apps. This enhances network effects as better data leads to better algorithms and, eventually, a better experience for everyone involved.

NEAR - 18. Social Dashboard