• Meta fell short of building the future of online social experiences and not giving its users the best.
• The future of the internet is a collaborative effort of many different projects, developers, and sovereignty-minded users.

The social media empire was founded in February 2004 and built by Mark Zuckerberg. The empire built by the richling has a history of using centralized systems to hurt users. Now it’s trying to join Web3.

The future of social media is left in the hands of meta and other big-time social companies. Just a superficial look at Meta’s history is enough to understand its tendency to seriously miss the mark.

Companies have a tendency of using Web3 principles for the wrong reasons, this is right the wrongs of Web2

There have been a few incidences where Meta fell short of building the future of online social experiences and not giving its users the best.

Meta-limited Open Graph

In 2010 Meta was still operating as Facebook, and it released its “open graph” protocol. This was to provide developers with a secure network of bridges between friends in order to motivate other individuals to take up its applications

This is a way paved for users to carry their Facebook identities from one app to another, This made it easier for the developers to give those users a personalized experience on the platform. A few years down the line, the company shifted gears to become ruthless in cutting off friends, Its newsfeed, and other data access from developers.

The main purpose of this was to limit competition. Facebook was worried that people would reverse engineer its social graphs and create their own version of Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica

A few years back, Facebook 2012 collected the personal data of millions of users on behalf of the British Consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The data was used for political advertising with user consent, and it was defining scandal within the company’s history.

By this action, Facebook only proved the need for an internet layer of self-sovereign security for identity and access controls.

More and more people are waking up to the importance of identity on the internet, and that’s something blockchain is perfectly tailored to address. Meta’s history also provides a textbook example of surveillance capitalism, which should offend any internet user right to their core.

The solution to Meta rests with social media users. The future of the internet is a collaborative effort of many different projects, developers, and sovereignty-minded users.

The events of older-generation firms also underline the importance of having a protocol for the internet that is owned by no one and can’t be centrally controlled.

A protocol is needed to help coordinate these efforts, set standards for social data interoperability, provide a universal data storage solution that is both decentralized and economically scalable, and enable application builders to quickly tap into existing resources.