Monetization of online services through collaborative cooperation with decentralized social networks

From Aleksandar Karadimce

Today's most popular social networks, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc., are centralised platforms owned by private corporations that unilaterally control the respective networks. International project "smART socIal media eCOsystem in a blockchaiN Federated environment (ARTICONF)" is devoted to researching and developing a series of trustworthy, resilient and globally sustainable decentralised social network platforms. Today, social media platforms are key technologies that connect people to global networks. They can create new forms of communication and bring about significant changes in mobilisation, business practices, the learning process and the acquisition of knowledge. Market companies currently carry significant social responsibility. They are not affected in many respects, including trust and concern for social media user data privacy.

Essentially, ARTICONF aims to create a decentralised and federated social media ecosystem, supported by an underlying blockchain technology seamlessly coupled with optimised trust-based measures in an anonymised environment, which simplifies traceability to identify bad actors and eliminates malicious contents such as fake news. Moreover, it's novel socio-cognitive, and smart matching practices integrate relevant users with common interests into an orchestrated networked community world without de-anonymising them. Supposedly, such a design would bring a range of social media actors (individuals, start-ups, SMEs) under one systemic umbrella and allow them to be a part of incentivised collaborative decision-making and sharing economy. In principle, ARTICONF presents a new perspective in the current age when data breaches and undemocratic practices are a regular phenomenon at the hands of centralised intermediaries, by creating an open and transparent ecosystem, where control lies in the hands of each anonymous user with provisions for individual or collaborative monetised enhancement.

The University of Information Sciences and Technologies "St. Paul the Apostle" from Ohrid is the carrier of the scientific research work for dynamic analytics and knowledge of the data obtained from the participants' joint cooperation in the smart ecosystems from social media. The main task will be to make aggregation, knowledge detection and experience based on interaction with users. Dr Aleksandar Karadimce, Assistant Professor at the University of Ohrid, is part of the team of researchers working on scientific research to develop interactive guided tools to improve users' monetised earnings of future decentralised social networks.

The three-year project, endowed with a budget of approx. 4.2 million Euros, brings together eight participating institutions from Austria, the Netherlands, Great Britain, North Macedonia, Portugal, Spain, and Norway. More information on the institutions involved in the development of the project and the scientific research achievements is available on the project website https://articonf.eu/.