[sweeds]

The one main advantage that I'm aware of is that a distributed, decentralized database for a social network would mean that there is no one private company that gatekeeps, owns, and sells the personal data within.

For all intents and purposes, Facebook's database is closed source. The community doesn't know exactly what this private company does with this data. We have to trust them with it. A blockchain database is trustless.

[dralley]

That's a complete bastardization of the concept of "trust" as applies to distributed systems.

You're not 'trusting' a single entity in that case because you're making literally all the information public for anyone to see, use, resell, etc.

That's like saying we shouldn't have to trust Equifax, let's just make everyone's name, address, SSN, and credit history public on the internet to begin with.

[Yoric]

There are plenty of distributed file systems that securely store confidential data on untrusted nodes by having well-design encryption. Is there a reason for which it would be worse with blockchains?

[dralley]

The whole point of social media is making that information available to people, though.

[tlb]

It's not actually trustless, though. It's just less clear whom you're trusting.

With Bitcoin, the people you're trusting are miners, and they are highly incentivized to preserve the correct functioning of the system because they get paid in bitcoin and they want it to stay valuable.

With a federated social network blockchain, there'd have to be an incentive to preserve privacy greater than the incentive to do any other bad thing like manipulating elections.