Discussions.app, a social media network inspired by the internet forum Reddit that runs on a decentralized blockchain ledger announced Thursday that it will move onto one of the world’s most active blockchain networks run by Telos.

Telos and Discussions intend to collaborate on a decentralized identity system that will enable people to record their Twitter accounts on the blockchain. As a result, when people get locked out or banned from Twitter, or other social media platforms, their friends will still know where to find them.

“Since the launch of Discussions.app two years ago, our mission has always been to give users back the control over their online social lives,” said Jacques Xu, co-founder of Discussions.app. “Telos helps us accelerate this mission in a time when our online social infrastructures are falling apart. This is more than just a partnership, it’s a collaboration to build a fairer and more sustainable way forward.”

Blockchain technology operates by providing a publicly visible transaction record that is recorded across nodes that must be agreed upon by all nodes before it is transcribed. Each transaction is then cryptographically recorded and protected by the next transaction in a chain, in this way every transaction becomes a building block that builds a roadmap that provides a trust that the previous transactions have not been changed.

In the case of user identity, a Twitter account – and its attendant tweets and messages from the past – can be recorded indelibly onto a blockchain in a history that can be archived so that they can be recalled so that a user can have proof to reveal themselves to their friends should they lose access to their accounts.

It is important that communities be able to police themselves, to remove trolls, bad actors and individuals who act in bad faith – sweep toxic individuals away – and this has happened with Twitter amidst recent events. It certainly has hit the crypto community hard with infighting and a certain amount of strife.

The platforms themselves, such as Twitter and YouTube have been banning crypto communities themselves, sometimes removing individuals without notice, tossing them into the void, and then just as suddenly reinstating them. In the case of Twitter their messages vanish from public consiousness and with YouTube videos go offline and become inaccessible for anyone who did not previously archive them. It becomes difficult to rediscover them afterwards, which can make it even harder for communities to reconnect a channel is removed.

“It seems that every few days I see another unique voice de-platformed and the connections they invested years building pulled out from under them like a cheap rug — especially in the crypto community,” said Douglas Horn, Telos chief architect.

The Discussions.app system currently provides a highly scaled, widely distributed discussion system similar to Reddit and Twitter that reaches an extremely broad audience with a large reach. With the addition of Telos, Discussions will also be able to integrate the ability to allow users to enable to virtual machines to use smart contracts and thus trade tokens and currencies with specific rules to create exchange rates and applications.

Ideally, a decentralized identity system would allow users to migrate from any social media they wanted without the need to worry about what platform they were on. They could be digital nomads and just attach a unique identifier to any handle on any network and their friends could then identify them on any social network by applying the Discussions.app there.

Be it Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, or any other platform, they would need only find the unique ID, open up the Discussions application and it would aggregate all the appropriate metadata. Suddenly what looked like a digital stranger, becomes a beloved friend again – and we don’t need to retain superhuman memory to recall five names for everyone to remember as everyone moves across different social media platforms.

“Discussions.app empowers individuals to secure their own social networks immune to the whims of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter,” added Horn. “At Telos, we share this vision of the empowerment of individuals.”

Image: Pixabay