The general election has been settled in the past few days, but just a dozen days ago, the collective blocking of Trump's social media accounts by American Internet platforms is actually still vivid in my mind.

It's hard to imagine this is the kind of move the internet platform would take with a still-incumbent U.S. president. Although Twitter CEO Jack also issued a document explaining that their move is correct. But these behaviors have also aroused everyone's renewed attention to the rights of Internet companies. Where should their authority be?

Now that things have happened, the possible subsequent impact will be more important. We also chatted with Suji, the founder of Mask Network, about how this matter will evolve.

Here is a brief introduction to Mask Network. When we first met them, what they wanted to do was to protect the privacy, data and sovereignty of Internet users under the cover of social network giants. The bridge from Web2.0 to Web3.0 helps users better access a more open Internet.

If you want to know more about Mask Network, you can check out our previous interview with them:,as well as,as well as"Mask Network Interview: Let More People Experience a More Open Internet"

The following are the main contents of the communication:

Suji：

In fact, everyone understands our main business. We have cooperated with some good projects before (refer to previous interviews with X-Order), and Twitter has also contacted us.

But in fact, in 2019, Twitter plans to form the Bluesky team to build a decentralized online community. At that time, many Twitter executives and many important employees joined the plan.

But I didn't expect that Twitter would directly block Trump's account this time. My understanding is that they may not be able to withstand the official pressure internally, and they will do whatever the official wants them to do. Because the operation of this ban is actually very unified, Twitter, Facebook and many other social networks are acting together. Perhaps it is because Trump himself likes to use Twitter very much, so it has become the person who rushed to the forefront, and the stock price has also fallen sharply.

In fact, I didn't expect that all the things we said casually at the time would come true. Many investors asked us before, what if Twitter banned Mask Network? I just jokingly said at the time that Twitter might first ban the account of the President of the United States, but I didn’t expect it to be a prophecy. But on a closer look, this matter may actually be a good thing for a decentralized social platform like ours.

In the past, many media and publicity organizations did not care about decentralized technology. They thought that even if Twitter or Facebook blocked their accounts, they could re-register a new account, or simply build a social network by themselves. But this time, the social network Parler established by Trump fans was directly deleted by AWS, which is equivalent to the server being unplugged. For them, this is quite a shock.

In fact, friends who follow Arweave can see that AR has risen again recently, which is also based on the same reason. Arweave is a decentralized storage project, and of course it is also a good partner with us. The decentralized file sharing and storage on the Mask product is cooperated by Arweave. Using this function allows users to share more content on social platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, but unlike sharing content directly on Twitter before, these files and information are permanently stored on Arweave in a decentralized manner and are deleted. After that, you can still find the previous content.

In addition, we also observed another thing, that is, Sci-hub, a well-known website for pirating academic papers, was also banned by Twitter. This website actually helped many researchers. But now after being banned, no one has a backup of this website except the official Twitter. This also means that after the post is deleted, it will never be seen again.

So we thought of a function before, users can not only use Mask to watch Twitter, encrypt and send some content, but also save it permanently. In this way, even if someone else deletes your post, you can restore it in the original place, which is what we call defending your data sovereignty. To realize this function, different decentralized storage networks need to be linked. Mask Network has already reached cooperation with Arweave, Sia and Filecoin to provide different options. At that time, users can choose which network they trust.

In the long run, this function can help users see a lot of historical information. For example, if I want to see a post posted by someone ten or twenty years ago, I can use this function to achieve it.

In fact, not only social accounts were banned this time, but we also noticed that Trump was refused service by some banks. In fact, the safety of personal assets has now become an issue. At present, Mask Network is embedding more stable coins deeper into the social network, hoping to protect users in all aspects, whether it is privacy, data or personal assets. For this, we have recently cooperated with Loopring.

In addition, in October last year, we co-hosted the 2020 Fifth Network Society Annual Conference "Practical Wisdom Network" in Hangzhou and the China Academy of Art. Many people were invited to this conference, including Glen Weyl, author of Radical Markets, Vitalik, Mark Nadal, founder of GUN, and Harry Halpin, founder of NYM. Harry turned out to be a professor and had a good relationship with the World Wide Web Foundation. Recently, he suddenly and directly announced that he would join Bluesky, which made us all feel amazing.

*For more information about the Web of Practical Wisdom, please see:The Web of Practical Wisdom——Panel 3: DWeb Conference Introduction and Participation；Network of Practical Wisdom——Panel 4: Introduction to Encryptionism Conference and How to Participate

Bluesky's recent large-scale recruitment may be a sign. The team believes that it is not a good thing to be forced to delete and ban some accounts by the government. Therefore, they hope that Bluesky will give them more rights and let them speed up the progress of the project. In fact, Bluesky has been established for almost two years, but it has not been active enough, and it has only recently started to recruit some very powerful people.

In the past, people may think that Bitcoin is an Open Money, Ethereum is a programmable Open Money, and there is Open Finance on top of it, but now it must evolve into Open Web or Open Data. A large part of the reason is because our decentralized industry has not evolved that fast. Stable Coin and Defi alone are not enough. Many U.S. monetary fund managers have already understood these innovations in our circle. Therefore, it is necessary to decentralize the entire Web, and the process of decentralization must evolve to the entire Web. This task is quite arduous, but the opportunities are also great, and many companies can make a difference in it.

Of course, people always ask me these few questions. The first one is why the users on these social networks don’t move? In fact, some people have already started to move. For example, the leaders of many small countries are very powerful. They opened a channel on Telegram and announced that everyone would no longer update Twitter.

Another question is, why don't Twitter or Facebook do decentralization themselves? In fact, we all know that Facebook wanted to do Libra before, but later changed its name and delayed. Twitter also said before that it should be decentralized, but now it can only fund Bluesky and find some powerful people to help figure out a solution. However, I think these measures will still be delayed due to government reasons. Right now, only more native, decentralized solutions like ours are useful.

Suji：

The results of his use now may not be very good. But our Mask Network will gradually use decentralized storage. At that time, the user may feel that he is posting on Twitter, but in fact the data is not on Twitter. This is equivalent to using the Netscape browser in the Windows system to surf the Internet, but the actual user surfing the Internet has nothing to do with Microsoft, but the Internet entrance is in the Microsoft system.

In fact, Twitter’s deletion of 70,000 fans is also very harmful to them, and they must continue to delete them. Twitter won't feel much of the damage in the short term. Let me give you an example. The mobile Internet has encountered similar things before. The operator charges extra calls to people who use WeChat to chat. However, WeChat was not afraid of it later, and directly issued a Sim card by itself, so that users can use WeChat online.

So even if such restrictions appear in the future, we ourselves are not too worried about competition.

Suji：

It is more difficult in the United States. Because people in the United States have a very naive idea: whether it is possible to make a social network and prevent Trump from using it, I think this is impossible.

But many countries in Europe responded quickly. For example, German Chancellor Angela Merkel first condemned Trump for supporting violence, but then condemned Twitter, saying that they should not delete posts. After that, Merkel proposed to use the money of the European Union Treasury to fund some decentralized projects, such as Matrix, a peer-to-peer chat protocol, and many other projects.

In the past two years, Europe has funded many projects, and we have also contacted various European funds. They think it is easier to understand if it is to encrypt emails, but why should we directly compete with Twitter and Facebook? But now they also feel that banning Trump's account is very bad.

This also includes the overall distrust of the dollar. There are some very small national fiscal options that directly exchange dollars for bitcoin. If I have distrust of the entire system of the United States, I will not hold dollars, I will not hold gold, and I will hold Bitcoin. Then if I have distrust of the entire network system in the United States, I should fund more decentralized projects. This is a change that is gradually beginning in Europe now.

Suji：

I think there will be great opportunities in the decentralized space. As before, I am still very bullish on Ethereum, and I think its dominance in the decentralized field has already been established.

For example, a Swarm project in Ethereum made a statement regarding the deletion of Twitter accounts. Swarm is similar to a storage protocol on Ethereum, funded by the Ethereum community. The founder said on Twitter several times that I do not support Trump, but I think there is something wrong with the account ban. Being able to say this kind of thing is actually very confident, and I feel that Ethereum itself has evolved.

The distribution of Ethereum's own market value and its currency holders is complex enough, which is the best thing. In comparison, Bitcoin is relatively pure.

This is why I think Ethereum is more promising. Because once Layer 2 is launched, users can also choose a different Layer. For example, if users find it strange to use Layer 2 in Europe or other regions, they can choose other ones. Even if you don't want to use Layer 2 in the future, you can put all the money back to Layer 1 and change the chain. But the user's entire use process is not affected by any centralized factors.

above.

Another: Just on January 22, 2021, the Bluesky team released an important news on Twitter. They released an assessment report on the decentralized network ecosystem and hoped to find the team leader within a few months.

In this report, Twitter evaluates various known distributed systems and analyzes how they handle key social networking elements.

Interested readers can click to read the original text to view:

https://matrix.org/