Synereo, a Tel-Aviv based company, has announced that its decentralized, open-source social network will move into alpha this September, being the first fully decentralized network based on principles of the attention economy.

Built on top of the company’s unique distributed tech stack, which utilizes blockchain technology to enable a peer-to-peer internet, the alpha version will become available after two years of development and refinement.

Synereo’s blockchain-based social network revolutionizes the concept of social media by placing control over content, personal information and monetization in the hands of users. Contrary to incumbent social media providers like Facebook and Twitter, Synereo’s social network cannot record or store personal information of any kind, and does not sell it to third parties, or target users with marketing messages. Instead, all network transactions and relations are encrypted on a distributed ledger and accessible to permitted parties only.

The Synereo network operates entirely without central servers or data centers. Instead, the network compensates users for contributions of storage and computation power when they support the distributed network with their personal devices. Additionally, the social network itself adheres to principles of the attention economy, which provides users with monetary rewards for creating and curating content that people like.

Synereo alpha will include the following features:

• Text posting with featured image: Test users will be able to post simple text posts and images
   
• Content labels (#hashtags): Posts will be taggable and searchable via hashtags
   
• Decentralized search capability: Content, users and other items will be searchable on the network
   
• Content amplification: Users will be able to promote content by charging their posts with the test network’s native currency (test AMPs). Accordingly, users will be compensated with said AMPs when viewing amplified content.​ 

“With this alpha release, we invite the community to a deeper conversation about the applications’s user experience, the attention economy powering it, and planned upcoming features that will be added to the application piece by piece in the weeks and months following”, Synereo said in a blog post.

The mechanics of Synereo’s underlying Blockchain 2.0 technology, as well as the basic dynamics of the social network, are presented here.​