Solcial: Can we take back control of our lives?

According to the Digital 2020 October Global Statshot Report, 4.14 billion people - half of the world's population - are active social media users who spend 2.5 hours every day on social media - this is an average figure.
Social networks are a tool for communication, exchange of opinions, self-development, job search, volunteering, searching for missing people, and helping those in need. It is also a source of information that keeps us up to date with world events.

Social networks help business to find an audience and interact with it, thereby improving the product offered.
These useful features of social networks are difficult to overestimate.
Initially, networks were created as a tool for communication, finding contacts and establishing connections between people. We are social beings and need interaction in order to maintain our mental health in the first place.
The positive impact of social media has been particularly evident during the pandemic. People could only communicate on the Internet, and this helped many not to succumb to discouragement and, in general, to better cope with the situation.

The pandemic and quarantine, together with the Internet boom and the spread of mobile phones, have led to the fact that the media has ceased to be an everyday tool and has become a way of life. We live in a digital and multimedia society in which all we do is constantly consume data, information, knowledge and the like. And we do this endlessly, which leads to the so-called "transmediation" of content. But all this information is spreading more and more widely, and is not limited to "quarantine". The Internet is an imitator of modernity, freedom and flexibility. Waiting is difficult for us, we have to be patient, and the Internet and the phone make life easier for us. However, all these endless benefits are also dangerous.

“If you don’t pay for a product, you are the product.” – Tristan Harris, Former Google Ethicist
You are losing your freedom. Social networks, especially Facebook, try to track everything we do: what we share, what we comment, what we like, where we go. "Now we're all lab animals" and we're part of an endless experiment of advertisers sending us their messages when we're most receptive to them. On May 15, 2021, WhatsApp changed its privacy policy and if you do not accept it, your account will be deleted.
The move also has political implications: Fake news groups have entered "a digital space designed to help advertisers reach their target audiences with messages proven to grab their attention." It doesn't matter to Facebook whether these "advertisers" are companies seeking to sell their products, political parties or fake news distributors. The system is the same for everyone, and it gets better "if people are evil, obsessed and segregated."
The fear of expressing disagreement, the fear of hurting feelings, of having a different opinion, makes us more and more "politically correct". There is a single way of thinking, and we all know what its dogmas are. If we dare to express a different opinion, we will quickly be perceived as potentially dangerous people, and the great media space of which social networks are a part will quickly and ruthlessly exclude a user with a different mindset.
Digital footprint. It all started in March 2009, the day Google, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon decided to create personal profiles for each user and filter search results.

The algorithms that social networks use allow collecting accurate information: a kind of digital footprint that every user leaves behind, whether it's a search on Google or a like mark on Facebook. This, in turn, makes it possible to extract so much information about the user that the algorithms recognize him better than his own parents, and this helps to offer him a vision of the world that suits his preferences and needs. Thus, the same term entered by two different people in a search engine will not give the same number or the same results for one and for the other, but it will be adapted according to what is known about each of the users, because, in particular , thanks to psychographic segmentation, which is a tool that allows a brand or political parties to divide their market into groups based on the personality of each voter, the system allows you to classify people according to their values, lifestyle, position or personality type.
Phishing. The word "phishing" (English phishing) is translated as "fishing" or "fishing". This is the name of one of the social engineering techniques for stealing user data, logins and passwords from accounts and payment systems. The first thing a hacker will take up is accounts on social networks: Vkontakte, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter. In the hands of attackers are all your correspondence , sent and received files, and subscriber base.

This opens up scope for various types of blackmail, the publication of provocative information, and again social engineering: hiding behind your identity, the scammer will contact each of the contacts list - this is how a chain reaction of scam activities can be launched. Another risk, often underestimated, is gaining control over the accounts of employees of various companies. Fraudsters can learn confidential information from correspondence or start sending reputation-damaging messages on behalf of one of their colleagues or managers.
There is only one way to fight the negative influence of social networks - to become free. But how can this be done? The new decentralized social network Solcial, which will be based on the openness of information, the absence of censorship within reasonable limits and fair remuneration. The information stored in such a network cannot be replaced or corrected, because it is stored on many computers at once, and the performance of the system cannot be affected by any single person. We can be sure that we manage our data ourselves and decide whether to advertise it or not.
How is it implemented? Content storage is implemented on IPFS, access to it occurs through a peer-2-peer (p2p) layer. What is IPFS? In simple words, this is a torrent tracker (storage), where nodes share files with each other that they store on their disk. They then share these files with other nodes, distributing them over the network and creating a set of many nodes that store the files, allowing them to be accessed regardless of censorship. Nodes will be available even if someone disconnects.

Benefits of IPFS:
content addressing. The content has a unique identifier, which is the cryptographic hash of the file.
No duplication. Files with the same content cannot be duplicated and saved.
Interference protection. The data is verified using a checksum: if the hash changes, the network will know that the data has been tampered with.

It turns out that each node stores only the content of interest and indexes information about who else stores what. The IPFS structure eliminates the need for centralized servers to deliver website content to users. It gives access to content locally, offline. Instead of searching for servers, as is currently the case, users will look for unique identifiers by pulling content from a million computers rather than a single server.
The advantage of Solcial as a social network is that the developers of such sites do not have direct control over the social network. Therefore, users are not subject to blocking or any restrictions on functionality. Each user has the same rights to use the platform.

What would you like to say in conclusion? Worst of all, most of us are naive about all the things the networks are doing to us. The main question is: will we be able to regain control over our lives? The best option would be to reap the benefits of technology without becoming trapped and dependent on networks. Technologies should serve creation, be assistants to humanity, and not vice versa. They are not intended only for production and consumption. Will Solcial help us with this? We'll see soon.

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