Note: everything written here is my opinion alone, not that of the deWeb Team or anyone else. 

In light of Elon Musk’s twitter takeover, many users are switching to an alternative platform: Mastodon. This is quite fascinating to see — it looks like people are slowly building up distaste towards the monopoly. Distaste with Web2 platforms always makes me more bullish on BBS.

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a distributed social network. Imagine every subreddit was hosted independently on a server. All the servers together are called the fediversre. That’s basically what it is, except the UI is more similar to the twitter model than reddit. Mastodon claims to be decentralised. I don’t buy it. Sure, all the communities are controlled by different servers. But users are still at the whim of whoever controls those servers. 

Also — there’s nothing that prevents the majority of servers to be controlled by one party. BBS is very different in this sense — and far more decentralised. 

BBS 

The core difference between BBS and Mastodon is that BBS uses a public database. This is crucial. BBS uses blockchain technology to create an immutable public database that no one controls. Mastodon makes no use of blockchain technology. It's just a lot of different servers -- but you are at a specific server's whim. 

Why can't BBS be centralised? 

Mastodon's ideal model is decentralised, but there isn't any incentive structure that prohibits the majority of Mastodon servers to be controlled by one party. This would centralise the Network, as discussed. 

BBS is very different. By design, it cannot be controlled by one party. The EOS blockchain records all BBS posts. The only way someone could attack the EOS network in order to centralise BBS content would be to own a majority stake. That would cost over $374,000,000. And even then, the incentive structure works so that if the attacker would simply be honest, they would be rewarded with tokens. It is extremely difficult for someone to centralise the EOS blockchain. And that's the only way you could centralise BBS's public database. 

Conclusion 

Decentralisation is becoming a buzzword. With respect, the way I see it, Mastodon is yet another project that claims to be decentralised but isn't. Like most social media alternatives, it's also a bit of a political echo chamber -- you could call it the Rumble of the Left (Rumble is a YouTube alternative with many right-wingers). 

At the end of the day, whilst it's an improvement on the twitter model, someone else still controls your posts, and can delete them forever. Someone could pretty easily centralise the system by having control over the majority of servers, which might even be the case now. I'd need to look at the data. 

Any form of truly de-monopolised social media will have to use blockchains, in my opinion. Indeed, BBS does. You'd have to behave completely irrationally to try and centralise the BBS Network, by attacking the EOS blockchain. And even then, your chances of success are slim. 

I think people are looking for alternatives to proprietary social media. The monopoly will not last for ever. 

Web3 is coming. And BBS is coming back to the future with it. 

Let me know what you think, 

Yoav