Facebook problems show the importance of decentralization

In a short period of time Facebook has gracefully provided us with several examples of the importance of decentralization:

⚠️ Opaque algorithm managed by a central authority leaves us completely at its mercy

The documents recently leaked by ex-employee Frances Haugen show that Facebook news feed still prioritizes hateful and divisive content, because it generates more engagement, and their claims to tackle the issue are empty.

⚠️ Centrally managed servers can easily fall prey to a targeted attack or internal error

Yesterday Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Oculus and Mapillary, all owned by Facebook and running on a shared infrastructure, went off for over 6 hours due to the loss of IP routes to its DNS servers.

⚠️ User data controlled by a central authority is always at danger of being hacked

Earlier this year Facebook’s data breach saw personal data of 533M accounts stolen and sold on a hacking forum. In late September another hacker forum user posted an announcement selling the data of over 1.5Bn Facebook users (this one cannot be surely attributed to hacking though: it’s possible that it has been scrapped from publicly available data).

Key takeaways?

When it comes to social networks (or any other online platform) we need an open-source protocol governed by its users and run on a decentralized network, where users own & control their data – in other words, we need a social network on a blockchain.

And where’s a need, there’s a solution ?