As of July 2021, expert research shows there were more than 4.4 billion social media users around the globe. Comparing the number with the current global population, it’s almost 57% of the number of individuals living in the world today.
However, nothing is perfect in life – neither is social media. Unfortunately, despite all the benefits brought by social media, it still has many issues, such as global censorship, unfair monetization, algorithm dictatorship, and network monopoly.
To solve these issues, Subsocial is creating a Substrate-based platform where people can build censorship-free social media DApps.
Decentralizing Social Media – Why Is Subsocial’s Proposal So Important?
Going in the opposite direction most industry-leading platforms decided to follow, Subsocial is building a free, censorship-resistant platform for decentralized social networks and marketplaces.
Built on Substrate, Polkadot’s backbone multi-chain network, the platform also has built-in monetization methods. This is a vital topic, as most big tech social media platforms rely on profitable monetization methods (e.g., Facebook Ads) as a competitive edge.
Structured as a set of Substrate pallets with a web user interface that permits individuals around the world to launch their decentralized social networks (communities), Subsocial is essentially like a decentralized version of Medium or Reddit.
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Subsocial Network – Features and Benefits
Instead of a server-depending public timeline, Subsocial developers can put an entire web app onto IPFS. This way, they eliminate the need for centralized hosts. Besides, Subsocial’s benefits mostly focus on governance, censorship resistance, decentralization, and moderation.
With a community-oriented approach, the platform has both built-in and flexible management roles by which individuals can manage communities, similar to Discord roles and permissions.
User governance is also a major concern, as Subsocial token holders own the network. Subsocial is built on Substrate, so its governance mechanism is the same as Polkadot and Kusama.
Within Subsocial, the different social media DApps are like community-owned spaces. Hence, the “owners” in each community decide who receives monetization rewards. In essence, it’s like a Subreddit with transparent on-chain moderation.
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Subsocial Network – Monetization
When it comes to monetization, Subsocial’s ultimate goal is to allow communities and individual users to monetize content while eliminating intermediaries. First, the platform has an on-chain pot of funding where users contributed to the ecosystem’s development and promotion.
At the community level, Subsocial has many distinct forms of monetization. Users can send donations, set up paid subscription features, rent or sell posts as NFTs, and deploy social tokens exclusive for their spaces.
As a Substrate-built interoperable platform, Subsocial permits developers to implement advanced payment options associated with DeFi and smart-contract technology.
Similar to other social media networks, there is also space for promoted comments and ads. This way, a community can set the cost at which users pay for ensured notification to an influencer.
Subsocial ads policy is a bit different from other industry-leading social media networks – which is an excellent thing. Spaces and communities can sell direct advertisement slots. Hence, they sell it directly to sponsors with on-chain control.
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Wrapping up
An active member of Polkadot’s Ecosystem, Subsocial has support from the Web3 Foundation. Also, the platform is one of the first 17 projects were accepted by Parity as part of the Substrate Builders Program.
Praised by Gavin Wood (co-founder of Ethereum and founder of Parity and Polkadot), the platform’s testnet is currently live. The remaining steps until its mainnet launch include a thorough audit of Subsocial’s Node code and the development of a cross-platform mobile app.