Part of Decential Media’s celebration and recognition of Women’s History month

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A major gripe of the web3 naysayers is the feasibility of a decentralized Internet. “Will it work?” is their biggest question, a question early stage start-up Plurality is poised to answer with a definitive “Yes.”

Plurality—which was recently accepted into web3 accelerator Outlier Ventures—is an account personalization stack that helps users access web3 platforms without the headache of remembering seed phrases or the need to have one’s data stored. Instead, users decide what data they want to share with a platform upon logging in which, in turn, can help generate a customized experience.

“I’ve been working in the web3 space for eight years now and I really believe in the vision of having control over your assets and data,” Hira Siddiqui, founder of Plurality, said to me during a recent interview. “Web3 technology has so much potential but even after a decade, ‘normal’ people are still not using it. Nobody in my family uses it, and while there are a few people here and there who have invested in Bitcoin, nobody is really talking about it beyond financial matters.”

The more Siddiqui talked to people in the space, the more she realized it was an onboarding issue. People were getting overwhelmed by talk about wallets and seed phrases. So Siddiqui set out to fix that.

“On web2 platforms—like when accessing Facebook, YouTube or Netflix—those companies have certain information about you and they use this information to provide you with an experience tailored to your specific needs,” Siddiqui said. “Web3, however, does not have that same layer available to do the same thing, and that’s where the idea of Plurality came into being.”

The company is creating an open social context layer where users can pull their data from many different sources. Users are in complete control of the data and can choose to selectively disclose certain information to the on-chain platforms they’re interacting with.

“Right now, we are completely relying on the giants like Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok,” Siddiqui said. “They have all of this data and they know what we want. Plurality wants to open this context, and once the context is open and sits with the user, they will be able to do whatever they want with their data.”

Listen: The importance of decentralized privacy in web3 and blockchain with Orchid Lab's Steven Waterhouse

In other words, users will be able to choose what parts of their life, both online and off, that they share from their wallet with a web3 platform in order to generate a curated experience.

“For example, if you go on a platform that’s music related, the platform can ask you to disclose your music interests,” Siddiqui said. “The platform won’t know who you are and they won’t store any information about you, but they can know that a person is interested in jazz and rock music and can curate an experience around that.”

Another example Siddiqui referenced was using a web3-based job site. The platform might ask users what their skill sets are and based on the answers they can be shown relevant jobs.

“This is powerful because until now, there has not been a portable context where a user can control their data and information preferences and take them from platform to platform,” Siddiqui said.

Plurality is hoping empowering users to be in the driver’s seat with respect to how their data is shared, while also maintaining a level of anonymity if desired.

“This decentralized technology has to be about connecting people in a way where they are in control,” Siddiqui said. “Users’ data should be private, but when required, users should be able to use that data to get useful experiences out of the platforms they’re visiting. It needs to be done in a way that’s different from web2, otherwise we’ll just end up with the same problems we had there.”

Siddiqui believes that to reach a billion web3 users they’ll need to be motivated by more than financial transactions, and Plurality is providing that through data control.

Read more: Decential Media’s coverage of women in web3

In some ways, the web2 world has been moving in the “user controlled” data direction with the opt-in/opt-out of cookies for websites, but skewed heavily in website owners’ favor. The technology Plurality is building skews more toward favoring users.

“Companies do not need to store user data because we’re talking about things being in an open context,” she said. “The next time the user comes back to a specific platform, that platform will have access to the user’s data, if the user wants. If the user changes their mind, then they can change their mind. It’s their data.”

She continued, “I like to think of it like you’re wearing a backpack and you have all of your books and items in there as you’re traveling across cyberspace. Every time you reach a new stop, you open the bag, and take what you need from it. If the stop requires a pencil, you take out the pencil and leave everything else in the bag. When you’re done with the station, you put the pencil back in your bag and you move to someplace else.”

It’s important to note Plurality is not reinventing the wheel here. Rather, it’s iterating on top of the existing infrastructure web2 has laid.

“Web2 was amazing at bringing everyone online. Even my parents—who are not very tech savvy—were able to use Facebook and WhatsApp because all of their friends are on there, the interfaces are easy to use, and they have a wide array of features,” she said. “We should not let go of the good parts. Web2 actually connected the majority of the world together and we need to ensure that if we’re moving toward the future of a decentralized Internet, then we also need to bring people there and at least give them the same level of experiences.”

Siddiqui’s focus this year is on communicating to the wider world that the problem of personalizing the web3 experience can now be solved.

“Interactions are only stored on-chain when there is a transfer,” Siddiqui said. “If I send you a nonfungible token (NFT), that transaction will show up on-chain. But what doesn’t get stored on-chain is the type of NFT it is or what else the user who purchased the NFT might be interested in. This type of metadata from the transactions is what we want to store with the user, with data points coming from both web3 and our daily lives in web2 as well.”