Solcial, the Decentralised, Censorship Resistant Twitter on Solana

What is decentralised social media? It is what DeFi is to TradFi.

The idea of decentralised social media has been floating around ever since the beginning of blockchain and crypto, though the concept is not without its sceptics. Though there are major problems such as the issue of necessary censorship (read: moderation), information storage, and income generation, this hasn’t stopped Aave from releasing their own ethereum-based twitter alternative, nor has it stopped decentralised social network projects like Only1, Bitclout, and Roll, from springing up all over the place. But perhaps one of the most interesting projects in the decentralised social network space is none other than Solcial, a Solana-based, censorship resistant social media platform, who has just raised 2.9 million from well-known crypto VCs such as Alameda, Rarestone, GBV, Shift, Noia, as well as the Solana Foundation.

The Old Web is Broken

Instead of delivering the promise of free and quality discussion and exchange of ideas, we find the old web to be increasingly censored, spammed, eavesdropping, dictated by algorithms and faceless moderation committees, and filled with formulaic content.

In particular, the centralised nature of established social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, means that its users, ultimately have no control over the rules governing these social media ecosystems. It is a faceless group of people who are doing the moderation, deciding the rules, and getting PTSD for it.

To anybody who believes that freedom of speech is as much about our own speech as it is about speech we don’t like, the Exile of Trump from Twitter should already be a very uncomfortable demonstration of astounding and stupendous power that centralised social media giants hold nowadays. The Twitter mob attack on PlanB that resulted in his temporary ban from Twitter, Facebook and Twitter’s acquiescence to the Modi government to silence critique on the Modi government’s handling of covid, and Spotify’s removal of Joe Rogan’s podcast episodes, should give us all reason to believe freedom of speech online comes with increasingly numerous asterisks.

And finally, the recent triple shutdown of Facebook, Whatsapp, and Instagram is indisputable proof of the dangers of centralisation. The entire planet was plunged into social media darkness because all social media was practically just one company.

As 6529 puts it, “the macro problem with TTPs (trusted third parties) and the increasingly centralization they provide is that are increasingly creating easy chokeholds to hijack the whole of society.”

Solcial’s vision

Having spoken with Solcial’s founding team, it is clear that Solcial was founded with a strong commitment to deliver what Web2 has failed to deliver.

Web2 has allowed us to enjoy the works of creators in every corner of the world; the maturing of Web2 has made it possible for creators to interact with their fans; and now, with the advent of Web3, fans will not only be able to fund and support the creators they like, they will be able to invest in them.

Users onboarded onto Solcial will be able to grow their work and careers financially, and fans will be able to support and influence the creators they support. Content posted onto Solcial is immutable. Smaller sub-ecosystems with their own moderation rules will likely evolve as Solcial matures. The room to exercise one’s freedom of speech is by design maximised to the greatest possible degree on the platform.

Like the Mirror Protocol, Solcial promises to be an open platform for publishing, but not just blogposts, but all the forms of online media we are familiar with. Writers, musicians, artists, scientists, mathematicians, and crypto natives can be sure their work will never perish. One might even see Solcial as Fiverr and Twitter on the blockchain.

The Solcial team anticipates that this will germinate a new culture of creator-fan interaction. “You will want that blogger to succeed, to win. The community will be much more proactive in who they subscribe to. Everyone will be able to use it to make money on their own. And they will be more incentivised to build, for your fans and supports, are quite literally invested in you. They are likely to help you, because their money is at stake.”

Twitter Intellectualism, but Immutable

But there’s more to this project. Many, if not most, works in the history of human intellectualism do not get to be passed down. Many of them are censored, destroyed, lost, or forgotten. The rediscovery of Cicero’s De Re Publica was not a privilege enjoyed by the Classic of Music and Frege’s destroyed Nachlass. The end of Geocities, bringing the destruction of a huge chunk of the early internet, demonstrates that the internet is not free from destruction. The Internet Archive, is one notable effort to keep records free and accessible. Bitcoin’s earliest discussions happened on obscure message boards. And indeed, it is increasingly common nowadays for tweets and reddit posts to carry significant game-changing ideas, not just on subjects crypto-related but on a wide range of topics, Solcial’s content immutability can ensure such intellectual substance remains available and accessible to mankind.

A piece of. Satoshi’s wisdom. Check out the full history of Satoshi on https://nakamotoinstitute.org/

Those of us who are more romantic will dream of this marriage of DeFi and the Creator Economy as one as productive and as glorious as the Florentine bankers of yore that fueled the Renaissance. Imagine a new up and coming scholar, with an active Twitter presence, a reasonable collection of GitHub repos, with several papers under his belt — now not only could you invest in him and support him on his journey, but you can also be sure that his notes and his works, would never be destroyed — like those of Newton’s.

Furthermore, Social’s vision to be a social network and not just a social token marketplace, suggests it will be the breeding ground for new forms of collaboration. One can imagine that hitherto unfunded and unfundable niche and nerdy projects would be unfunded and unfundable no more. Omniglot, the internet’s most impressive encyclopedia of languages and scripts (real and constructed) could now scale, both in its reach and its finances. Wikias and Fandom could now be financialised.

The Road Ahead

Of course, one of the greatest problems that all decentralised social media faces is that it’s rather difficult to have people migrate from existing platforms. Twitter the behemoth and the center of all crypto community communication, commands a fantastically powerful network effect. The fact that decentralised social media almost by definition requires users to onboard with crypto, complicate things further. It is perhaps in face of this difficult landscape that Bitclout resorted to their “onboard them without asking” strategy that caused so much upset, as well as their recent rebranding.

The Solana Ecosystem

Having said that, there are well-known industry strategies to get around that. Clubhouse’s invitation-only strategy is one. But putting oneself in the larger picture, the accumulated creator discontent toward Youtube’s algorithmic dictatorship, lends one optimism to a project like Solcial. Furthermore, building on Solana, a chain that supports 400,000 transactions per second with minimal gas fees, Solcial is riding on a very robust blockchain ecosystem with much room to grow.

How will the Solcial ecosystem develop? Beyond funded artists and musicians, a new challenge to this increasingly centralised world, what lies beyond? Did people anticipate the Arab spring from Twitter? Did people anticipate the collapse of Kodak from the iPhone? What kind of new cultural norms, cyber and real, will we see? Like Reddit and 4Chan, neither of which requires email registration, what kind of discussion, be they intellectually stimulating or repugnant, will we see on Solcial?

“We don’t actually know, but we are very excited to see how the ecosystem is going to develop.”

Solcial aims to launch in December 2021.