dailyhodl.com
Crypto venture capitalist Sriram Krishnan is giving his take on the future of decentralized social media as multiple projects in the space make their mark.
In a new interview with Bankless, the general partner at venture capital fund Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) says that people are increasingly discovering the benefits of decentralized social media platforms.
Krishnan says a number of decentralized social media projects are under development that stand to benefit from people migrating away from centralized platforms, where decision-making is made by a select few.
“Mastodon, for example, has gotten a lot of usage or a lot of attention over the last few months, which I like. I’m obviously a crypto maximalist. I just like it that people are getting used to, ‘Hey, maybe I don’t want one centralized set of people making all my decisions. I want to control my own destiny and maybe the group around me should set my own policies.’
So that’s one. There are others. For example, Jack Dorsey has been talking about Nostr quite a bit.
On the more blockchain-decentralized side, there have been lots of projects. There’s Lens led by Stani [Kulechov], and then the one which I’m probably most familiar with because we invested is Dan Romero’s Farcaster, which I actually think is – I’m biased – but it’s kind of the right long-term vision.”
Krishnan also says that much of what will form the backbone of a decentralized social media ecosystem already exists in the crypto space.
“If you go down the intellectual maze of how do you get legitimacy, provable decentralization, all the good things that we take for granted, you will wind up somewhere with ETH, or somewhere with a blockchain and not trying to recreate a bunch of that.
For example, how do you rotate your public key? How do you make sure every server has all copies of data? how do you have sovereign rights? These are all things that have kind of been solved with things like ENS (Ethereum Name Service) and ETH and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and so on. Again, I’m a fan of people trying out different things in decentralization.”