It’s been a terrible week for Facebook, with policymakers and users alike demanding answers from the social network over its Cambridge Analytica fiasco, in which the data analysis firm improperly accessed the personal information of about 50 million Facebook users.
But the backlash has had at least one major beneficiary. That’s Mastodon, a Twitter-like social network that has had a massive spike in sign-ups this week. As the #DeleteFacebook movement has gained steam, people are registering for Mastodon at four times the rate that they normally do, according to Eugen Rochko, the service’s creator.
Between Monday and Tuesday alone, Mastodon gained about 5,800 new users, Rochko said in an interview. That’s more new registrations than what Mastodon typically sees over an entire week.
[Facebook had a closer relationship than it disclosed with the academic it called a liar]
Designers such as Rochko are part of a wave of technological innovation aimed at clawing back some of the power that elites, such as Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, have spent the past decade amassing. Rooted in the idea that it doesn’t benefit consumers to depend on centralized commercial platforms sucking up users’ personal information, these entrepreneurs believe they can restore a bit of the magic from the Internet’s earlier days ā back when everything was open and interoperable, not siloed and commercialized.
How to keep an eye on our data as it moves from one owner to another is a tricky problem that Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali have been working on since 2013. When the pair founded Blockstack, a new kind of app marketplace, they flipped the model on its head. What if instead of trusting companies to hold all your data, the information always stayed with you, on your computer or a cloud storage provider of your choice? And what if every time a new app wanted to access your data you simply gave it a key that could decrypt all that personal information that you controlled? If you later decided the app was no good, you could just take back the key.
[Who is Christopher Wylie, the guy giving Facebook headaches?]
āThereās no company in the middle thatās hosting all the data,ā Ali explained. āWeāre going back to the world where itās like the old-school Microsoft Word ā where your interactions are yours, theyāre local and nobodyās tracking them.ā Unlike Word, the apps on Blockstack come with all the powerful features of an Internet-native application. Two apps on the Blockstack marketplace already work this way ā Graphite, a kind of decentralized version of Google Docs, and Stealthy, a decentralized messaging app.
What makes this model possible is the blockchain, the underlying technology that supports bitcoin. Many of us know bitcoin as a kind of digital cash, or a type of investment asset that’s subject to wild price swings. But the supporting blockchain technology is a powerful record-keeping and transaction system that opens the door to much more than exchanges of money.
[Why Facebook usersā data obtained by Cambridge Analytica has probably spun far out of reach]
To be clear, under this model your data isn’t stored directly on the blockchain; the key you provide simply points to the place on your hard drive or server where you’ve stored your data. At scale, this has massive implications for security and privacy. Rather than billions of people trusting big companies to store their information, that same information is spread out across billions of separate machines, making any single breach ā like the massive one that hit credit-reporting company Equifax last year ā far less damaging. And it helps prevent companies such as Facebook from making unilateral decisions about how to handle your information.
The blockchain enables other uses, too. Because the security of the blockchain is maintained by lots of computers working in concert to prevent fraud, some developers have built apps that take advantage of these computers’ unused processing capacity to run entirely new, decentralized programs. That combined computing power can, well, power a Facebook without Facebook’s corporate machinery or private infrastructure. By the same token, the blockchain could lead to an Uber without Uber, or an Airbnb without Airbnb.
Despite the promise of these ideas, the developers face enormous challenges. Given how dominant platforms such as Facebook are, encouraging users to switch away from those networks could be a massive hurdle, particularly if their friends don’t follow.
āThe reality is that most people do not want to run their own Web servers or social network nodes,ā Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula and Ethan Zuckerman, three researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, wrote in a recent Wired essay.
Still, the rising interest in decentralized social networks such as Mastodon shows there’s growing appetite among Internet users for something ā anything ā besides the model laid out by Silicon Valley’s biggest companies.
Unless Facebook wins those users back, disrupters like Zuckerberg could someday become the disrupted.
