Decentralized Social Networks Sound Great. Too Bad They’ll Never Work

First, these tools will face challenges acquiring users and gaining the attention of developers. Tools like Diaspora and FreedomBox encountered difficulties attracting a permanent user base, and it’s likely new platforms will, too. Social networks, in particular, are difficult to bootstrap due to network effects—we join them because our friends are there, not for ideological reasons like decentralization. And while existing social networks have perfected their interfaces based on feedback from millions of users, new social networks are often challenging for new users to navigate.

These platforms also pose new security threats. Decentralized networks generally allow anyone to join and don’t link accounts to real-world identities like phone numbers. These systems often use public key cryptography to ensure account security. But managing public keys is hard for most users, and building software that is both cryptographically secure and easy to use is difficult.

Social media platforms are curators, not just publishers. Platforms like Facebook control not only what is acceptable to publish, but what posts we see, bringing the most interesting posts to one’s attention. Platforms tend to optimize for advertising revenue, prioritizing attention-grabbing or feel-good content. Designing robust reward mechanisms to curate content that keeps people informed rather than entertained remains a problem. If distributed platforms could solve it, they could theoretically tackle media challenges like echo chambers and filter bubbles, but such dilemmas still present a serious challenge for new systems.

Finally, platforms benefit from economies of scale — it’s cheaper to acquire resources like storage and bandwidth in bulk. And with network effects, which make larger platforms more useful, you have a recipe for consolidation. Even in self-consciously decentralized systems like Bitcoin, there has been a natural consolidation toward super-participants like large mining pools and exchanges. Market consolidation is also driven by user-targeted advertising models, which encourage hoarding of user views and data, discourage interoperability, and drive platforms to become ever larger.