Decentralized Socials
If you haven’t been living under a rock, I’m sure you’ve heard that Elon Musk is on his way to buying Twitter.
He has been openly discussing Twitter’s issues with his followers and most of them stem from centralization. A huge talking point was the banning of Trump from Twitter. Musk is all for freedom of speech and he believes silencing someone on a platform is overreaching their power, no matter what they’re tweeting.
Now, this is obviously up for debate, and everyone sees it differently, but many believe decentralization can solve the social media issues we have today.
Facebook/Meta announced they will take a 47.5% cut on their NFT marketplace, Horizon Quest, basing their decision on other centralized marketplaces like the Apple App Store and Roblox. This decision is so disconnected. If they spent one second in an NFT project’s Discord server, they would know that people are already complaining about the OpenSea fee of 2.5% and how their competitors are taking a smaller fee to attract users.
There are many companies attempting to solve these centralized issues.
They’re trying to create the next web3 social media platform and they’re going about it in many ways. The obvious approach is to rebuild the already popular platforms with Web3 aspects.
In India, a company called Chingari put up their hand to replace the now-banned TikTok.
There’s a decentralised Twitter called Peepeth and a popular blogging platform like Medium called Mirror.xyz.
Early adopters are earning with Theta Network, a YouTube-like streaming platform that uses your spare computing power and rewards you in their token.
There’s even a company that enables you to leverage your current following on all web2 social media apps. Raiinmaker tracks the engagement you get when promoting campaigns from their app and rewards you with their token.
All of these apps have an earn aspect to them and basically pay you to do what you’ve been doing this whole time. I wouldn’t call this complete decentralization, but rewarding users for using your platform is a breath of fresh air.
The imitation approach makes sense, but is it enough to pull users away from these massive companies that people are so happy using?
The other approach is to build the infrastructure to facilitate a decentralized and convenient social network.
This is what the Lens Protocol is doing. The guys who created AAVE have built it and the idea is to enable us to have one social graph that any application can plug into. A social graph is basically all the information that a particular platform has on us, our followers, likes, posts etc. and it uses this information to curate our feed. This is the problem with Web2 social media.
We need to create a new social graph on each platform, basically, starting from scratch.
The idea is to take your identity with you, no matter which app you login to.
Many social apps and platforms can build on the protocol and the user experience jumping between them will be seamless and tailored to their activity and interests. This enables a whole lot of interesting capabilities that weren’t available before because of the gatekept data of each social media platform. Imagine being able to aggregate and compare posts and follower data across multiple platforms, making it easier to improve your content strategy.
This will improve content curation and it opens up the possibility of creator collaboration in an organised and efficient way.
Lens Protocol enables users to own their content, as they can mint each part of their social graph as an NFT.
Whether that be a tweet or the first follow or like of someone you admire, we can own every part. The potential for a protocol like this excites me. It changes the way we think about social media and gives us an opportunity to own our content and online identity across all platforms that come along.
It’s still early, but this might change the game.