The Future of Social Media on Qortal
January 24th, 2025
Web Development
Privacy
Web3
Blockchain
The explosive rise of social media websites on the internet has undoubtedly made a profound mark on the web, transforming how we share information about ourselves with friends, family, and even complete strangers! It has significantly changed the way communities unite and grow, has influenced political movements and celebrity fandom, and one could say has completely overhauled the ways businesses approach online commerce, forging a new chapter in online marketing forever!
But such a sudden cataclysmic shift in where people spend time online, with as many as 63.8% of the world's population using social media everyday, with average usage of 2 hours and 19 minutes1, has not had its fair share of concerns, both moral and social. The giant corporations in control of the major social media websites now have the datasets of billions of people around the world at their fingertips. They are in a powerful position, able to use this data for all sorts of potential uses, including malevolent ones. There are many such examples in recent history.
Social media applications are ubiquitous on the normal internet, and are used by 5.22 billion people every day2
For example, the 2010 Cambridge Analytica scandal, where a British consulting firm harvested data from 87 million Facebook profiles to sway political elections in the United States.3 This data had been taken surreptitiously, without users having consented to it of course. Or the Tiktok scandal of 2022, where the company admitted that it used its own app to spy on reporters as part of an attempt to track down the journalists’ sources.4
Facebook has taken a lot of heat over the years for being caught up in countless scandals over mismanagement of their users’ data5
And these are only stories which came to light through the work of whistleblowers! The full extent to which social media companies mismanage user data is unknown, but there is a fair chance that it is used to covertly improve their own algorithms to subconsciously influence people into taking certain actions, or worse yet, sold to third parties6 where it then becomes impossible to know how this data is used.
So are internet users beholden to these tech firms, forced to give up their data in order to use an application they enjoy on the web? The short answer is no - but there’s work to be done! The evolution of the internet into Web3, where the data control falls back into the users’ hands, and where centralized servers no longer reign in data hosting, is the hope to solving this privacy issue.
But most existing Web3 projects offer little in the form of a decentralized product. Most still rely on centralized services such as Amazon Web Services to store user data, or ask users to use a Chrome wallet for managing their coins, which leaves it very vulnerable for phishing or hacking attacks.7
Chrome wallets are easy pray for hackers looking to steal people’s crypto8
That’s where Qortal comes in. It’s a project that sticks to the Web3 fundamentals: open source, peer-to-peer, fully decoupled from the normal internet (apart from your ISP), and having launched with no initial coin offering (ICO). It also allows developers to build what are known as Q-Apps, directly on the blockchain, using only Javascript. These apps run inside the Qortal UI, and are thus integrated within the Qortal infrastructure, meaning they are unhackable, uncensorable, and together form a parallel economy which can thrive outside the normal internet.
With that being said, Qortal would be a perfect place for an ambitious developer to build a new social media app, one where the users are in full control of their data, and one where censorship doesn’t exist. This kind of app can only be possible on an infrastructure such as Qortal. Because of its fully autonomous architecture, nobody can control anybody else’s data to their own advantage. Furthermore, given that anyone can run a full node, including on something as small as a Raspberry Pi, the chances of a single node controlling most of the data on the network significantly decreases.
There are already so many apps built on the Qortal ecosystem!9
On top of this, given that QORT powers everything on the Qortal ecosystem, a smart developer would also leverage this to his advantage, allowing communities on his social media Q-App to earn income for managing their groups, or to charge for extra services on the app itself. The possibilities are endless, and the transactions seamless! Small fees too!
To conclude, it seems obvious that the current model used by social media websites isn’t working as best as it could, with a new scandal associated with these companies coming into light regularly. The problem always remains the same: concentrating most of the data of users using these applications onto the private servers of giant corporations always leads to problems, with censorship and mismanagement a common occurrence.
It’s not a matter of if, but when a Facebook, or Instagram, or X clone is built on Qortal by a developer. And this time, it will be built with the end user’s data sanctity in mind! It’s time to reclaim our data on the internet, and start browsing an alternative internet based on transparency, trust, open source code and data control. Head to the downloads page now, and install it right away! See you on Qortal!
2. The Sun. (2023). [Social media topic banner image]. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/TOPIC-BANNER-750x352-social-media-1.jpg?strip=all&w=750&h=352&crop=1
3. Business Insider. (2019). Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie explains how Facebook data was misused. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-christopher-wylie-facebook-data-2019-10
4. The Guardian. (2022). TikTok owner ByteDance fires workers for accessing data of journalists. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/dec/22/tiktok-bytedance-workers-fired-data-access-journalists
5. The Economist. (2018, March 24). Print edition cover: USD001. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20180324_USD001_0.jpg
6. Futurism. (n.d.). Twitter is selling your data to the government. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://futurism.com/the-byte/twitter-selling-data-government
7. CCN. (2024). How scammers target hot wallets: Protect yourself. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://www.ccn.com/education/crypto/how-scammers-target-hot-wallets-protect-yourself/
8. CCN. (2024). [Hackers targeting hot wallets]. Retrieved January 24, 2025, from https://www.ccn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/hackers-hot-wallets-768x432.webp
9. Ferrari, J. (2025, January 24). User interface of the Qortal Hub showing the Q-Apps Dashboard [Screenshot]. Qortal Hub.