IN-DEPTH: Open Source Systems Are the Future of Social Media: Minds CEO

Open source is 'unleashed, so it can’t get taken down, because it’s been widely distributed'

Bill Ottman, co-founder and CEO of the Minds social media network, in New York on April 10, 2023. Jack Wang/The Epoch Times

It is inevitable that an open source system will take over social media, said Bill Ottman, co-founder and CEO of the Minds social media network. Minds is a free, open source, crowdfunded, and encrypted social networking platform.

Contrary to popular belief, open source media apps can be secured by licenses: they are resilient and censorship-resistant, Ottman argued.

“It used to be that all software was just free, and software licenses didn’t even really exist,” Ottman told EpochTV’s “American Thought Leaders” program in a recent interview.

“It was just that the academics were all sharing software,” Ottman said. “Then, this whole proprietary software, intellectual property mode of operating came into play with Windows, and everything started getting locked down.”

“You can actually build a hugely successful business enterprise with open source,” Ottman said, adding that Linux, Wikipedia, and Bitcoin are examples of successful use of the open source approach.

Linux “is the most famous open source operating system powering the majority of the infrastructure of the world,” Ottman.

Wikipedia “was revolutionary in what it did” despite having problems with the editing, the administration, and some of the censorship that occurs there, Ottman said.

“It’s fully open source. All the software and the content is creative commons, meaning that it can be shared freely with attribution,” Ottman said. “It beat out all of the proprietary corporations that were trying to dominate the encyclopedia world.”

Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, has been developed as a “fully open source and transparent system” and gained popularity because of that openness and accessibility, Ottman said.

Open Source Code is Secure

There is a public desire “for greater access to information, both from the government and from corporations,” Ottman asserted, but “there’s always an excuse” for companies to be more secretive, whether it’s under the pretext of national security or the infrastructural security of the software.

Many companies argue that publishing the source code of their software could pose a security risk to their users, Ottman added.

“The rationale for companies keeping their software secret is always just based on this irrational fear that someone is going to steal your idea or steal your code.”

“We are flattered when people take our code,” Ottman said, referring to the company he heads, which has opened its source code.

“We want people to take our code because that’s spreading our technology. You can actually build a hugely successful business enterprise with open source.”

The best cybersecurity experts say that “open source encryption protocols are the most hardened and battle-tested,” Ottman continued, “because you have that public accountability, and you’re essentially having all the smartest people in the world audit your code and find the holes.”

Bitcoin has never been hacked despite every incentive to hack it, Ottman said, claiming that “it seems to be one of the most secure encrypted protocols that we’ve ever seen.”

Wikipedia works, and it does not seem to be getting hacked, Ottman said. Once in a while, exploits get found in Linux, but the vulnerabilities get fixed, “and the world doesn’t end.”

The Epoch Times reached out to Wikipedia for comment.

Securing Open Source

Businesses that have invested a lot of time and money into developing their software may be reluctant to make their source code public, fearing that it is like “giving it away,” Ottman said. “But what people don’t realize is that there are licensing models and software licenses that you can use that do protect you, but also enable you to be transparent.”

For example, Minds uses a license that allows others to commercialize its software but requires that any changes to the code made by an individual or a company must also be open-sourced and shared with the public, Ottman said.

The license used by Minds is General Public License version 3, which was created by the Free Software Foundation. It is the same license that Twitter uses to protect parts of its algorithm recently made public, Ottman said.  What it means, he says, is “Here’s the code, you can do whatever you want with it. You can use it ... but any changes that you make you have to share with the whole world.”

The Twitter app is seen on a smartphone in this illustration taken on July 13, 2021. Dado Ruvic/Reuters

Twitter announced in a statement on March 31 that it had opened a portion of its source code to the global community, including the algorithm that recommends to Twitter users other users’ content.

Some licenses allow only viewing the published source code for the purpose of auditing it but prohibit the commercial use of code for a number of years, Ottman said.

Resilience

Publishing source code can make software more resilient to taking it down, Ottman said. This is partly because other developers who view the source code could create more resilient versions of the software that cannot be taken down, he explained.

Further, if software is developed by an individual who is politically targeted and that software is not public, it will be easy to find that individual, take him out, and take control of the software “because he was the only one with access to the code.” Ottman said.

However, if that person made the software public and it is widely distributed it cannot be taken down, Ottman said, “It’s unleashed.”

Censorship Resistance

The Minds app,  seen on a smartphone on May 1, 2021. Screenshot by Ella Kietlinska/The Epoch Times

Minds does not store content created by its users on a centralized platform, but instead provides for each content creator functionality to take their posts and social graphs to another social media platform, Ottman said. This decentralized content ownership model makes the content “censorship resistant.”

“It actually takes liability away from the platform because the content is unleashed on the world.”

The company uses a decentralized open source protocol called Nostr (Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays) to make the user identity portable, Ottman said. Nostr assigns each person a cryptographic key pair in the background which is used to sign each activity of the person on the Minds platform, he explained.

“You can take your private key that you get on Minds, and you can actually leave Minds and go to another app on Nostr,” Ottman said.

There are dozens of social media apps on Nostr, Ottman continued. So the user who left Minds can easily upload their Minds’ content and followers to another platform.

However, if a person gets banned from YouTube or a social media platform like Twitter, the content the person has been creating for years becomes unavailable, Ottman added.

This can be devastating to those who use social media for marketing their business, Ottman said. If an account is banned, the following that its user has developed for over a decade that is directly correlated to their livelihood and ability to influence the world is gone, he explained.

Nostr is supported by Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, who donated Bitcoin, worth roughly a quarter million dollars, to fund the protocol’s development.

Social media platforms storing people’s content on centralized servers can also utilize Nostr and “participate in this new decentralized internet,” Ottman noted.

“The momentum is totally unstoppable because, at the end of the day, it creates a more resilient network that can’t get taken down,” he said.