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What is a social network

Roy edited this page Feb 2, 2022 · 1 revision

What is a social network?

A social network, in essence, is a web2 service that holds private convos between network participants. Though conversations, by default, before they were mined for data, were temporary & mutable.

The responsibilities of a social network:

  • Keep an index of all network members' personality contracts (profiles).
  • Rate each member - credibility in network - the network is to ban/kick members off the network (deem them unworthy) and act to maintain order and data integrity within the network.
  • Hold (cache & index) mixed data (data by passive side). Such as opinions / reviews.

Not the responsibility of a social network:

  • Host user data and personal content

User data needs to be able to travel freely between applications. The best way to do that is on-chain. Interaction within groups, however, especially non-public groups, is best done off-chain. Perhaps even deleted after a certain time.

Public interaction may be better kept on chain. In some cases. Whenever the author feels that it's important enough to pay hosting/gas fees. Ideally, we'd probably want our important things to be immutable and permanent (articles) while our less important things (posts & comments) to evaporate after some time. After all, it's sometimes better to change your opinions than to remember your opinions. And if opinions should be mutable, then so should their records.