Introduction

Bitcoin rose out of necessity from the ashes of the Great Recession. It is a result of people waking up to the fact that the few who control the power are abusing that power as a quiet tool of injustice. We are now living in the middle of the age of the Great Censorship. A few elites hold the power to moderate our information flow, and this power is, more often than not, used as political weapons to spread misinformation and manufacture consent.

Necessity = the mother of invention after all - @redphonecrypto

We observe a need for an open and decentralized social protocol as a public good, to provide a pro-social alternative to other existing networks and protocols.

There are no shortage of decentralized social protocols today. One of the first that gain meaningful adoption is Mastodon using a federated approach. Some protocols focus more on avoiding singletons, such as Scuttlebutt, as well as others that try to align incentives with its users, such as Steem and BitClout.

It is a difficult and unique problem that many others are trying to solve. Why another, and why now?

We believe that for such a social network to be credible, it must exist as a public good; a platform token that’s designed to capture value from the network ultimately takes values away from the network, setting up weird incentives alignment between the platform and the users.

We also believe that such a social network must be non-rivalrous, and should incentivize its “rivals” to build on top of one another, rather than playing a zero-sum game that promotes a winner-takes-all mentality.

We took bits and pieces from many protocols before us, and have made some tweaks with the above missions in mind. We found that building on top of ETH and ENS while keeping the option to integrate with other naming systems in the future, plus a decentralized data component with a centralized search & discovery API, to be the most promising in terms of delivering such ideals.