Exploring Decentralized Social Media

Your voice is precious

For those of you who know me personally, you know that I have been censored time and time again by several members of the Big 5. The Big 5 are Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. I was on Facebook for 10 years before being shadow banned after the 2020 General Election season.

I have also been banned from many subreddits on Reddit. The only social media home I have right now is on Mastodon. Imagine if Twitter couldn’t suppress the voice of its users? That is Mastodon.

Mastodon is like a twitter clone but with one very important difference, it’s decentralized. Decentralized means no single entity controls the network. Instead of having one giant server that is maintained by a single entity, i.e Twitter, Mastodon has what is called instances.

Instances are servers maintained by people like you and me or they can be maintained by companies or government agencies. ANYONE can setup a Mastodon instance and say whatever they want. NOBODY. I mean NOBODY can shut down your Mastodon instance. You are in complete control of your instance.

You have to be technically savvy to setup and secure a Mastodon server. If you have no idea what you are doing, you are taking a big risk because an improperly secured server can be hijacked by hackers and used in a botnet.

If you do not want to setup your own instance, you can join an instance hosted by someone else. Which brings me to the point of this article. Mass Address is working on setting up our own Mastodon Instance under the massaddress.io domain. It will be hosted in Switzerland and we will not suppress the voice of our users. ALL forms of speech will be allowed.

The only thing that will not be allowed on our instance is adult content of any kind. Some people might say this policy restricts our G-d given First Amendment rights but that simply is not the case. You cannot go into a grocery store and have sex with your significant other. Society has deemed that unacceptable and anyone with a sound mind would agree.

Adult content does not belong in a public forum. People want to speak their mind and not be censored while doing it. This will be the foundation of our platform. You can say whatever you want, to whomever you want. Since the servers will be hosted in Switzerland, the Big 5 cannot shut us down. The U.S. Federal Government cannot shut us down.

Currently, our engineers are working on the backend code. Once the code is complete and the servers are deployed, we will begin testing usability. Once our code is viable, we will look into modifying the Mastodon Source code to connect with our decentralized identity platform.

If we cannot modify the Mastodon source code to work with Mass Address, we will not setup a Mastodon instance. The reason is because no explicit privacy can be offered using a standard database. The sole purpose of Mass Address is to offer US Citizens explicit consent and privacy when it comes to their identity.

-Hood