MeWe social community with 20M customers to combine with Polkadot parachain

by Jeremy

Social community MeWe will combine with the Frequency blockchain community, a parachain of Polkadot, in response to an April 26 announcement at Consensus 2023. The announcement added that the corporate will start transferring its customers’ accounts over to the community throughout this quarter.

MeWe was launched in 2012 and has been touted as a “Fb different” with allegedly higher privateness protections. An Axios report in September said that the community had over 20 million customers. Frequency launched as a Polkadot parachain in November.

At a Consensus 2023 panel known as “Laying Web3’s Basis With Decentralized Social Networks and Knowledge Rights,” MeWe CEO Jeffrey Edell said that the transfer will enable MeWe to make a everlasting dedication to information possession for customers:

“Blockchain is like doubling down on privateness. So now you’re permitting the expertise to do what firms promise […] Sometime MeWe may get acquired by somebody, a giant firm, and in that occasion, the privateness facets could possibly be misplaced, however as soon as we decide to the blockchain, we’re committing to that privateness aspect.”

“We by no means surveilled, we by no means amplified unhealthy information or misinformation, that’s simply not one thing we do, so we’re very logically set as much as transfer into the Web3 world,” he stated, including, “We’ve to kind of march into that slowly and prudently however with full dedication.”

In keeping with the announcement, the mixing between MeWe and Frequency is predicated on the Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP), which Woodham labored on as a part of Frank McCourt’s Undertaking Liberty. McCourt allotted $100 million to that venture in June 2021.

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Amplica Labs was the preliminary technical contributor to Frequency. Its president, Braxton Woodham, who was additionally on the panel, emphasised that the partnership between Frequency and MeWe won’t clear up all issues in social media straight away. Nevertheless, he claimed that it will present a fundamental framework that app builders can construct upon to repair a wide range of issues sooner or later.

“Social networks contain a whole lot of completely different issues, starting from the consumer expertise to moderation to AI algorithms for curation,” he stated, explaining that “it’s nearly unattainable to unravel all issues without delay, and so the strategy we’ve been taking collectively is, let’s hyperlink our digital presence collectively on the internet to create the social net. That units up the flexibility to assault the information layer and strategy these troublesome issues.”