Increasingly complex security and privacy regulations have been eating away profits of giant social media platforms for some time. By now, Big Social's reputation is far down the drain. In the early 2000's, you wouldn't even consider that an army of legislation specialists were needed to run such basic post-comment platforms – the unpreparedness of their executives front of government scrutinity more than proves that. Nevermind the technological challenges, or even the costs involved in keeping those platforms aligned with common sense regulations such as the GDPR – the morals were lacking from day one and there's no hotfix for that. Now you have crumbling democracies all over the world, with big, thick and flashing red arrows pointing to Big Social as the key igniter.
Twitter is now posing as the centerpiece in the social game, with a new chieftain speeding up its already ongoing decay. As a new medium, Big Social failed miserably to deliver. Tweets were supposed to be short texts, but this wasn't enough for capturing human expression – who would have thought? Users had to invent threaded discussions on top of tweets, manually numbering their tweets to form a linear log. Instagram posts were supposed to be actual photographies, users deemed it not enough and started encoding textual content rasterized on those images – you can't index it, you can't search it, and it is not accessible.
In retrospect, we find now how simple minded their founders were. The idea behind every Big Social platform certainly makes for a fine Elevator Pitch™, and nothing else – Big Social does not equate big ideas, it's small ideas that went big thanks to a shitload of money injection. Injecting steroids on an anorexic body won't make it strong, by any means.
From the start, B.S. (Big Social, for short), were never meant to elevate human communication, but to elevate earnings of a few, already wealthy white men, instead. Back then, this was clear for anyone paying attention, now it has become a fact, obvious even to the average citzen. Speaking of things obvious, it is now time to reflect if centralized social media is something obvious, like books are obvious. Obvious things have substance. Obvious things are implementation independent. Obvious things are transparent. Obvious things lasts forever.
In a recent exposition, someone outlined a long list of things that could go wrong with Twitter from a technical perspective. From my understanding, none of these problems would even exist in a decentralized setting. Decentralized is winning without lifting a finger, just wait until it makes a fist.