Would you pay, at all, for a social media service?

(Yeah, neither).

...what if paying for the service meant that you owned all of your own data?

(A liiittle more tempting now, no?)

Decentralized Social (DeSo) is on a mission to create all the tools needed to run such a network.

The team behind the project have built a bunch of their own decentralized social platforms - but the code is open source, meaning others can use it to dream up a totally new decentralized social platforms of their own.

But big ideas come with big problems...

The two biggest hurdles so far have been:

1. Making it cheap (the cost of blockchain based data storage is nuts!).
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   E.g. To store 1GB of data on Ethereum will cost you a cool $393M (not a typo). The DeSo token gets that down to $80 per GB.
   ​
   To put that into context, $1 of storage on DeSo, would hold the equivalent of roughly 58,000 tweets.
   ​

2. Making it easy to access.
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   Setting up a DeSo profile costs a fraction of a fraction of a cent (not bad). The only issue is, most people don't hold DeSo tokens in their wallet.

...and that's where todays news story comes in:

DeSo have just partnered with one of the worlds largest stablecoins, to allow onboarding through a commonly held token (USDC).

Here's the cool part:

If enough users move to a decentralized social network, advertisers will want to follow...

And if users own all of their own data, advertisers are going to have to pay them to access it.

Which would mean users would get a cut of ad revenue, just for using the platform.

Wild!