Spasm slides

Spasm

The future of social media is here

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Social media is broken

People use DeFi, cryptocurrencies, p2p markets, but the vast majority of communication is still controlled by a handful of slave tech platforms.

Let's have a look at the history of decentralized social media platforms, mentioning the most notable solutions.

Traditional social media (TraSh)

Most people use centralized slave tech platforms like Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Reddit, Facebook, and Instagram.

- Lack any interoperability
- Censor alternative opinions
- Track users and sell their data
- Controlled by corporations
- Discriminate against AI agents
- Usually block Tor traffic
- Might restrict VPN traffic
- Often restrict FOSS clients
- Require email addresses
- Sometimes require phone numbers

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The rise of blockchain-based platforms
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The year 2016 marked a significant milestone with the launch of **Steem**, a blockchain-based social media platform, which integrated cryptocurrency rewards for content creation and curation, giving users a financial incentive to participate.

In 2020, due to centralization issues the platform was overtaken by Justin Sun and Binance's CZ, resulting in a community-driven fork **Hive**, which eventually suffered from the same problem of centralization of power in hands of a few.

The **Lens** protocol, introduced in 2021, continued experimenting with a blockchain-based approach using the Polygon blockchain. And **Farcaster** tried to combine offchain with onchain data storage.

However, **Steem**, **Hive**, **Lens**, and **Farcaster** are social graph-based closed ecosystems that rely on network effect and lack interoperability with other protocols. They also face scaling issues due to storing data onchain, often resulting in centralization and loss of censorship resistance.
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Multi-signing
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In 2024, Spasm V2 enabled groundbreaking multi-signing, which allowed users to simultaneously sign the same message with multiple private keys using different protocols and broadcast to different networks, while still having the same deterministic Spasm ID so replies from different networks can be properly chained to the parent event.

For example, the post about Session vs SimpleX architectures was multi-signed on [monero.top](https://monero.top/news/spasmid010a70651fc27fb9125f7ea) with Ethereum and Nostr private keys and propagated to other Spasm instances like [degenrocket.space](https://degenrocket.space/news/spasmid010a70651fc27fb9125f7ea) and [dark.vegas](https://dark.vegas/news/spasmid010a70651fc27fb9125f7ea9f945d6add3530af91c829cdc414bcd5dda080f3020).

Since the article was pushed to Spasm and Nostr networks, you can also read it in your [native Nostr app](nostr:note1e94uvd0vx2k9mgdgnzzpqmdh0swkqmkhq6uy4c2g3pganxy96pvqlkvmsz). All native Nostr replies to this post will also show up on Spasm instances that enable the Nostr network in settings.

Multi-signed messages display multiple pubkeys so authors can take advantage of different ecosystems like unique usernames from blockchain-based Ethereum naming services and offchain social graph from Nostr.
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              Other keys
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Spasm is an agnostic and highly modular solution so more protocols, networks, and private keys will be integrated in the future.

Communities with popular web3 browser extensions and simple signing logic like Solana or Dogecoin can easily be integrated within the next few years.

PGP keys, popular among developers, cryptographers, security and privacy people are more challenging to integrate because the process of signing events with PGP keys is more complicated since PGP keys are not stored, and should not be stored, in browser extensions or in mobile apps.

There are also other keys that have easy-to-use browser extensions, but various challenges make it harder to integrate them into Spasm, e.g., Starknet or Zano.

One of the most challenging keys to integrate is a Semaphore key that allows users to sign a message on behalf of a group without revealing who actually signed the message.
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