Privacy & Data Sovereignty

Context

Many of the implications we face with existing social platforms are fundamentally rooted in centralization.

For example, relying on one corporation to host and disseminate all of our information through its centralized servers enables the following:

• Full control and ownership over user data

• Tracking, spying, targeted ads, and censorship

• Algorithms that reinforce existing perspectives and have little transparency

• Minimal interoperability with other networks and services

• One-size-fits-all experiences through enforced feature sets

• Centralized, top-down moderation

• Attention-based revenue models that dilute user experience and encourage psychologically harmful design patterns

• Vulnerable security through one central point of failure

• Service downtime and threat of complete shutdown through bankruptcy, acquisition, etc.

• Little community governance in directing company resources and product development

The list goes on...

Fortunately, many, if not all, of these issues can be addressed by simply shifting towards a decentralized infrastructure where all communication is happening peer-to-peer and there are no corporate middlemen sitting between interactions taking place.

Flux achieves this through its use of emerging distributed technologies like Holochain, IPFS, and others as well as through the co-development of a meta-ontology called AD4M.

More on our technical implementation later on.