Bring Your Own Data and Algorithms (BYODA) is a radical, new, and, open social media platform:

• All your data is stored in your own personal data server (your ‘pod’), running in the cloud. You have full access to your data and full control to give and withdraw access to that data to others.
• Anyone can develop apps and services on the platform, lowering the effort required to develop new social media services.
• The platform is open source; everyone can contribute or review the code.

With this platform, we can build new services where you can:

• Select who you want to moderate content for you.
• Define your own monetization strategy for content you create.
• Chose a recommender algorithm to generate your feed.
• Have your identity confirmed by a trusted third party and use your identity across multiple services.

We came up with the idea of BYODA after watching the documentary ‘The Social Dilemma’ on the dangerous impact of social networking services on our mental health and on our societies. We believe a fundamental redesign of social media services is needed, where we decouple the core functionalities of a social media service and enable people to chose who they want to provide these various functionalities for them. To find out more about the ideas behind BYODA, you can read some essays we wrote on the Medium site.

The alpha release of the reference implementation of the BYODA pod is available on Github, including instructions on how to get your pod up and running on either Azure, Amazon Web Services, or Google Cloud. With the alpha release of the pod now available, we are moving on to implementing a demo service to show to power of the architecture.