Subsocial — build your own decentralized network

The Internet is one of the greatest inventions of the human race. It is a place where everything is possible. Want to create a community of knitting enthusiasts? Easy. Looking to buy a vintage microphone in perfect condition? Here you go. Searching for your long-lost member of the family? He is probably on social media.

All this freedom and opportunities… But is it actually freedom? Yes, you can create content and, in some cases, get paid for it, but even this comes at a price. Google sells your personal information, Twitter bans you for something you said, and YouTube gives a fraction of its earnings to actual content creators.

The World Wide Web is not as free as it was once destined to become. Huge IT companies have taken over the market and tell people what they can and can not do.

Do you want to control the content you create? Now, it is possible.

Subsocial Network: what is it?

Subsocial is an open-source platform that allows anyone to create their own decentralised social network.

More precisely, Subsocial is a set of “tamplates”, special Substrate tools with a user-friendly interface. Using them, anyone can create their own version of Reddit on Polkadot, which would work as a separate blockchain.

In addition to censorship resistance, the developers have put an emphasis on monetisation — Subsocial offers built-in tools for those who want to make money from their service.

Examples of monetisation available:

☑️Tips. Social media users can make donations or set up subscriptions.

☑️NFT. Posts in the format of non-excha tokens can be sold or rented out.

☑️ Promotional comments. Paying for mentions of a product or service by Influencers.

☑️ Social tokens. Users of individual communities can launch their own cryptocurrency.

☑️ Direct advertising. Advertising slots are controlled by social network creators — intermediaries between developers and advertisers are eliminated.

☑️ Smart contracts. Experienced developers can implement their own monetization options using smart contracts.

The platform is supported by the Web3 Foundation, from which it has received grants, twice!

What problems does Subsocial solve?

Subsocial doesn’t just allow you to make money from your own social network, it also combats the unfair practices of site like Facebook and Twitter. With monetization, most of the content-makers earnings go to the big social networks, and users ability to support their favourite author is limited. Subsocial allows everyone to create their own service and set fair rules, and at the same time provides aspiring developers with a wide range of tools.

Other problems Subsocial solves:

☑️Global censorship. The IT giants have become a monopoly in the content market and can silence even the US president.

☑️Limited customization. Users of popular services have little or no ability to customise their pages.

☑️Algorithm dictatorship. The algorithms for delivering content to each individual user are less user-centric, and it is impossible to change them.

☑️ The monopoly of network effects. New social networks struggle to challenge monopolist, which do not share their network effects.

Advantages of Subsocial:

☑️ Decentralisation. You can create your own Twitter or Reddit, but put it not on Amazon Web Services or another centralized host, but directly on the decentralized IPFS file-sharing network.

☑️Moderation. Subsocial-based networks are resistant to censorship, but users of a particular community can set their own rules internally if they wish.

☑️Roles and permissions. Developers are offered out-of-the-box tools for allocating permissions with granularity.

☑️DAO. Communities can have multiple owners. It can even be an organization that models groups and sets the order of rewards.

☑️ Treasury. Subsocial has a special fund. Money from the fund is used to develop and promote the ecosystem.

Subsocial will also allow to rent communities, which is also very interesting. Let’s say you have a very popular social media and someone wants to draw more attention to their latest content. They could pay you to rent space on your pages and display their content where all your users will see it. Alternatively, you can rent a popular post in another person to attract traffic to it in exchange for royalties.

Also, if you publish content on a site like Twitter or Medium, it is questionable whether you still own it at all. They own the data. At Subsocial, this content is always tied to your cryptographic key — you are the sole owner.

Roadmap

Some of what has been planned for Subsocial is yet to be implemented. The team plans to add several options that users are sure to appreciate:

☑️ Free transactions for confirmed users;

☑️Tips for authors of posts;

☑️ Launch of social tokens.

In late 2021, the team is planning to start developing a cross-platform iOS/Android-enabled mobile app.

Summary

What does the distant future holds for Subsocial? Maybe it will be a social media utopia, rich and abundant in content, thriving in a way that is only possible in a truly free environment. All we can be sure of, the future of Subsocial is in the hand of people. They set the rules, and that is exactly how the Internet should be.