When I started using traditional social media I loved it.
Instagram was simple, a beautiful stream of pictures from people I followed.
Twitter was simple, a short stream of updates from people I followed. Just 140 characters.
Over the years, the need too monetize, the need to increase engagement meant more and more features, more and more dark patterns, more algorithms to raise the “best” content to the top of your feed.
Although I still love much about social media, there is not a lot of dislike too. I’d like to return to simpler times.
Obviously traditional social media doesn’t want us to go there, it cuts into their profits.
Decentralized social media presents an opportunity for us to build the experience we want, regardless of what the billionaires running traditional social media want.
We can approach this in two ways: Examine current traditional social media and eliminate everything we don’t need; Or we could just start with a blank page add just the thing we need.
The key word here is need, wanting a feature is not enough. The bar to include features to make things more complicated will be very high.
I don’t know exactly what I’ll end up building, but it will be simple.
It won’t have all the features of the application that exist in the DeSo ecosystem, but that’s entirely the point. It will do a few things and do them really well.
[Originally published on the DeSo blockchain]
