This is an idea for a decentralised Twitter type social media application using Mina as a way to prove identity but at the same time allowing anonymity.
The idea was inspired by seeing the amount of homophobia / racism / sexism generated towards Twitter users by anonymous accounts and the ‘fake news’ circulated by bots…
So the basic idea is that you could link the social media account with a KYC that verifiably proves you are a genuine real person, but still allows you to be anonymous (this is important as it still gives a level of privacy).
Violation of the terms of service would result in a warning/ban/permanent ban depending on the severity of the violation.
Financially it could be done on an annual subscription basis, potentially tied in with a wallet creation fee and initially it could be an invite only platform for Mina Wallet holders and as interoperability increased be expanded to other crypto chains that had a bridge with Mina (eg polygon/eth).
In the UK there seems to be a lot of ongoing discussions over Twitter harassment etc and I think it is only a matter of time before Social Media companies will require some kind of KYC when creating an account (or at least I think there is a gap in the market for an app that does that).I can imagine similar discussions are taking place in other places too.
Using a Mina Snapp to verify your identity to a platform, but to also remain anonymous could be a game changer. Imagine a platform like Twitter without the ads, without the spam and without the bots.
I know a lot of people would prefer a totally decentralisation solution, but I think that could bring with it its own set of problems too. Maybe an initial compromise would be to have a number of KYC partners and a new user would be random assigned to one of them?
I would be interested to know
If anyone could breakdown the logistic steps how a snapp like this could be made from a development point of view. Obviously it is a fairly big job.
Would the platform be essentially off-chain and the verification Snapp work like an OAuth login?
Could its use be incorporated with IFPS to handle media files?
Is anyone interested enough in the idea to investigate it more?
Nice idea definitely the future, coding aside i think the hardest thing would be to get people to use it tbh. With twitter WhatsApp Facebook etc… Been so popular getting people off those platforms isn’t going to be an easy task. From a marketing perspective your better off targeting young people, our up and coming future generation. 12+ onwards i guess, which is doable as though the observation with my own children the current 16-21+ age range don’t even care about Facebook whatsapp etc there generation is Snapchat or so it seems. Ultimately all socal platforms have there time web 2.0 killed off Friends Reunited perhaps web 3.0 can kill off our web 2.0 socal platforms one way or another.
The big sell is no ads, no bots, no spam. Adoption is hard, but when it offers something different…?
I think a way to introduce it could actually be right under our noses and open it up for the crypto community initially. Taking the logic a stage further maybe the cost of subscription could actually be incorporated into the wallet creation fee?
Mina builds a bridge to ETH, ETH wallet holders can join, we build a bridge to Solana same again… etc a gradual growth could also allow the system to take the increase in load,
It doesn’t have to compete with twitter, facebook, instagram etc as it wouldn’t have to sell advertising, that alone would be a powerful marketing tool.
the idea is very good. This idea is not limited to Twitter. Think about it, you log in to all social media applications through mina and everything is kept private. Zuckerberg won’t like it. ahahah
Related to what has already been discussed here, I’ve just thought of one more potential application area that would be interesting for Mina’s zk technology. This is the field of dating sites such as Meetic, Tinder, OkCupid and so on. To register and interact on these sites (millions of users every day), you need to provide a lot of private information. There are at least two problems that Mina could perhaps solve. 1. the centralization of private information 2. the difficulty of avoiding lies that lead to scams or other more serious problems between users. One blockchain project that has already attempted to solve both these problems is Hicky.io in 2018, but this project has disappeared in the meantime despite showing great promise: Love Is 'No Battlefield' With The Blockchain, But Is It A Perfect Match? Another project that seems more or less similar is matchpool.com, which runs on a Guppy ERC20 token. A dating site based on Mina’s zk technology, this could be a very interesting novelty and perhaps even a game changer?