Decentralized Social Media with Evan Henshaw-Plath

We all know about all the things that are wrong with social media as we know it. It's a model where everything is centralized and the market dynamics foster very few competitors who just get bigger and have more power. Who builds? Who governs? Who owns? Where are the servers? Where do the applications sit? Where does the data live? It's largely in just a few companies that in many cases have walled gardens of content. This dominant model yields a tremendous centralization of power for tech executives who are incentivized by market dynamics, to grow and to extract and to capture more and more of our attention. So, how do we get ourselves out of this mess? Does the answer lie in decentralized social media?

Our guest for this episode is Evan Henshaw-Plath, veteran Silicon Valley engineer and CEO of Planetary, a decentralized social network.

In this episode we cover all things decentralized social media, including:

• The story of Twitter's "original sin" where it abandoned a federated model for a centralized one [4:14]
• A framework to think about decentralization across the Internet and social media [12:22]
• Distinctions between web3 and the dWeb (decentralized web) [15:18]
• What a protocol is, why it’s a core element of decentralized social media, and the current landscape of protocols [15:33, 23:37]
• Architecture and design considerations at protocol vs. app levels [28:39]
• Big debates in the decentralized social media space [31:31]
• Issues with blockchain based solutions [36:28]
• Evan’s vision for decent social media and what he’s up to with his startup, Planetary [38:56]

Resources:

• Denizen's writeup on decentralized social media
• Planetary's homepage
• Evan's homepage
• What obligation do social media platforms have to the greater good: A TED Talk by Eli Pariser
• ‍My first impressions of web3: by Moxie Marlinspike, who founded Signal
• The Battle for the Soul of the Web, The Atlantic Oct 2022
• dWeb principles‍
• ‍Web3 is Self-Certifying: by Jay Graber, the CEO of Twitter's spinout Bluesky