Background
As a PhD student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at McGill, Alireza is working on Massive-MIMO techniques for 5G wireless systems. His scientific interests also include information theory, quantum computation and physics. Being in contact and eventually working on daring projects that are only feasible at B21 was the main reason he applied to BLUE. Moreover, the opportunity to be in a room with many smart, visionary and brilliant individuals was indeed very important to him. Alireza's BLUE project focuses on designing a modern social network architecture that natively addresses three main issues: security, control over content and freedom of speech.
Blockchain Social Networks
What's wrong with Facebook? This simple question opens the door to many unresolved and unforeseen issues with existing social networks and even more broadly with world wide web or the Internet itself. While there are several paramount issues to consider, in this project, we attempted to explore the consensus mechanisms in the context of social networks.
In a conventional social network, there is a centralized web server that runs the backend algorithms and also stores the users' data. Needless to say, in practice, there are a huge number of serves working together and the centralization refers to the fact that all the backend processes are handled by a single entity. Although this is the intuitive architecture and practically the most efficient way to build a social network, as the number of the users grows larger and larger, more unpredictable problems start to appear. One of the major issues is how to keep all the users with different tastes and beliefs happy. In essence, this question brings us to the very old problem of all societies: what is the best form of government? Compared to the real world however solving this problem in digital domain is both, paradoxically, simpler and more complicated. It is simpler because in digital domain we do not face many constraints of the physical world. On the other hand, since we cannot trust a unique digital identity for any individual, consensus mechanisms are more challenging. From the organizational point of view, centralized systems are one end of the spectrum and decentralized systems are the other end. While a few decentralized services like BitTorrent file sharing, have been around for many years, practical decentralized consensus protocols came to life after the advent of blockchain.
A democratic social platform is indeed interesting because in the real world this is perhaps the best we can imagine. But can we do better in the digital world? First of all, we have to see what is wrong with a democratic social network (or generally an IT service). Although the worst-case scenario is when 51% outvote the rest, let us consider an example where 99% agreed and only 1% were not happy with the outcome. In case of Facebook with 2.3 billion monthly active users, one percent means 23 million unhappy users. Consequently, even if Facebook becomes a blockchain based decentralized and democratic social platform, the satisfaction of all the users are not guaranteed.
"A democratic social platform is indeed interesting because in the real world this is perhaps the best we can imagine, but can we do better in the digital world?"
As mentioned earlier, since the constraints of physical world do not apply in digital domain, we have more degrees of freedom. To make this clear, we can think of the digital word as unlimited number of earths with unlimited resources on each and anyone can travel to any of them. With this analogy in mind, we can introduce the recently coined concept: "Fediverse." The Fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is the ensemble of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers that are used for web publishing (i.e. social networking, microblogging, blogging, or websites) and file hosting. Federation is a form of decentralization. Instead of a single central node that all people use, there are multiple nodes, that any number of people can use. On different servers (instances), users can create so called identities. These identities are able to communicate over the boundaries of the instances because the softwares running on the servers support one or more communication protocols which follow the open standard. As an identity on the fediverse, you are able to post text and other media, or to follow posts by other identities. In some cases, you can even show or share data (video, audio, text and other files) publicly or to a selected group of identities and allow other identities to edit your data (i.e. a calendar or an address book).
In 2008, the social network identi.ca was founded by Evan Prodromou. He published the software GNU social under a free license (GNU Affero General Public License, AGPL). Besides the server, identi.ca, there were only a few other instances existing, run by persons for their own use. This changed in 2011/2012 when identi.ca switched to another software called pump.io. Several new GNU social instances were created. At the same time as GNU social, other projects like Friendica, Hubzilla, Mastodon and Pleroma integrated the OStatus protocol, thus extending the fediverse.
In the meantime, other communication protocols have evolved which are integrated to different degrees into the platforms. In January 2018, the W3C presented the ActivityPub protocol, aiming to improve the interoperability between the platforms. The concept of Fediverse is very new in the tech industry and requires years of research and development. Nevertheless, because of its particular innate properties such as diversity, security and decentralization, Fediverse is yet the most promising model for future of social networks.
