Will NFTs Marry Social Media?

Will the Social Graph Become Decentralized?

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A brief intro to Lens Protocol, semi-launched on May 18th, 2022

Hey Guys,

We know that the likes of YouTube, Instagram and others are going to try their best to infuse NFTs into mainstream social media. But for Web3, the obvious other possibility that it is born from Web3 startups themselves.

Because in February, 2022 near the height of the NFT hype YouTube was the latest tech giant to explore the possibility of using NFTs on their platform, joining the likes of Meta and Twitter. YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki recently recognized the potential of Web3 technologies such as NFTs to create an additional revenue stream for Youtubers. While TikTok has unveiled live-streaming subscriptions and Twitter has rolled out Super-follow subscriptions, monetizing creators better is not the same as decentralizing social media.

The Advent of Subscription Social Media Will Be Sticky

With Twitter?launching Super-Follows, the era of subscription based social media is really taking shape in 2022. Tipping live-streams on Twitch, Selling E-commerce products on YouTube, making valid arguments on TikTok for a better humanity! Ah well.

Web3 has been thinking about how to make social media better and upgrade the social graph with decentralization, for quite some time.

What does it mean to decentralize social media?

There are a number of ways to understand at web3. Here are two of them:

Creators Owning Their Content

1. These sound similar but they're not. The first one says, "Twitter makes money when I tweet. In web3, I will make money when I tweet."
2. The second one says, "I should carry my tweets with me. If the Twitter experience starts to suck, I should be able to instantly plug my tweets into a Twitter competitor that is doing a better job."

How will Web3 really change the future of social media, how will it be in the Metaverse? These are the sorts of things I like to think about on the Weekend.

With?Super Follower only Spaces?now available to selected creators that offer subscriptions, it’s clear Twitter things a lot about the Creator Economy’s future. So is TikTok, Douyin, Snap, YouTube and others as it it turns out.

NFT Based Social Media

So how would I carry social media around with me anyways?

Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph. You can have a profile, write posts, follow people, comment on their posts, etc.

Of course, that's not the interesting part because social media does all of that today. The interesting part is that all of those relationships used to be tables in the Twitter database and now they are NFTs that you hold in your wallet.

This means that your data lives in your wallet - Twitter always has to face stiff competition because users can run to new companies offering new, unique, innovative experiences in an instant.

Lens Protocol Goes Live May, 2022

AAVE, a leading project in the decentralized finance (DeFi) space, has unveiled the?Lens Protocol. The protocol will launch on the Polygon network, and it will allow users to create a lens profile and engage with the over 50 applications available on the protocol.

This of course is brought to you by?team behind DeFi mainstay Aave?has launched?Lens Protocol, a decentralized social graph that allows developers to build web3 social media platforms all run on the Polygon network.

See Lens Protocol Website

As of May 18, anyone can follow a Lens profile, but the only people able to create a Lens profile are the 30,000 original signers of Lens Protocol’s open letter – including big names in crypto.

This bears watching imho.

Lens Protocol

A permissionless, composable, & decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy.

By using NFTs, Lens allows developers to create unique experiences on top of that data. Maybe you want to create a Twitter where the first 100 followers of every popular account gain access to a secret club. Or maybe you want to show off the fact that you were Beyonce's first ever follow.

Lens lets you do that.

Lens is pretty far away from posing any significant challenge to current social media - the most popular app using?Lens has about 10,000 users?- but the idea is definitely interesting. It makes the consequences of "own your data" much more tangible.

"I should carry my tweets with me. If the Twitter experience starts to suck, I should be able to instantly plug my tweets into a Twitter competitor that is doing a better job."

It’s hard to know how much to take projects like Lens seriously but it’s always worth a look. It’s unclear if Web3 will challenge social media by 2025 or if it will be some distant future perhaps.

What is Lens Protocol?

Lens Protocol is the brainchild of the team behind DeFi mainstay?Aave, led by Aave’s founder?Stani Kulechov?and CEO Alexander Svanevik. The team also includes CTO?Jan Isakovic, who previously worked on 0x’s smart contracts, and Product Manager Filip Martinka.

Lens is an open-source social graph that allows developers to launch web3-ready social media platforms and profiles. It is built on?Polygon’s eco-friendly blockchain and works to enable creators to take ownership of their content wherever they go in a Web3 environment.

Web3 refers to the next generation of the internet where users are in control of their data. In a Web3 world, there is no need for intermediaries like social media platforms because users can interact directly with each other.

Lens Protocol is built with modularity in mind, thereby allowing new features and fixes to be added, thus ensuring that the social graph keeps up with the ever-evolving Web3 world.

In terms of Web3, many analysts believe that DeFi solutions have among the most potential to be sustainable projects.

How is it Powered by NFTs?

Non-fungible tokens will be used to manage user profiles and content.

This open-source and composable social graph can empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community and the content they post on the platform through?NFTs.

NFTs are used on the platform to represent user profiles. Users can create profiles that interact with each other forming a social graph. The data and user relationships are stored on-chain on Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake Layer 2 solution. This makes it possible to port data from one platform to another without a central authority.

For instance, a profile owner can publish standard content, which points back to the profile owner or follows other profile owners through Lens Protocol’s whitelisted logic embedded in the NFT’s smart contract.

From setting an image for the profile to the setting of the profile’s “dispatcher,” everything about the profile can be managed on-chain, thereby giving users complete control over their data.

The DeFi Social Graph is Coming

The platform also allows for developing social media platforms and profiles compatible with Web3 wallets like MetaMask, Gnosis Safe, and Argent. This compatibility makes it possible for users to log in to their social media accounts using their Web3 wallets without creating a new account on every other platform they interact with.

Free Speech and Censorship Resistance in Social

It’s a bit beyond belief.

The launch of Lens Protocol comes less than a month after Aave founder?Stani Kulechov was temporarily suspended?from Twitter for tweeting a joke that he was the new interim CEO of Twitter. It’s almost hard to believe. But Twitter has all sorts of auto-ban features, where you cannot even talk to a real human.

My Take

The move by Elon Musk to take over Twitter has also triggered a debate as to whether the Tesla CEO will integrate cryptocurrency. Clearly social media is very centralized in just a few platforms and their interpretation of the Creator Economy doesn’t really facilitate user-generated content to be easily monetizable.

Twitch, YouTube and TikTok?at least try to help creators monetize, though not very well. LinkedIn allows people to?make courses on LinkedIn Learning?and earn some income that way. Sadly Facebook, LinkedIn and even Twitter have mostly been left behind.

It remains somewhat doubtful that the social graph will become decentralized anytime soon.

More likely is social media will become subscription based increasingly like with what Twitter is doing with Super-follows or what TikTok is doing with live-streaming. This benefits the top 2% of creators and not the average user.

To create a social graph, you need to have a way to track these relationships between people. This is usually done with some data structure, like a graph database. It’s years of consolidation and massive amounts of siloed data with millions of users. What can Web3 startups hope to do against the data treasure droves of Meta, Microsoft and Google? It doesn’t even make much sense.

Among Web3 however, Lens Protocol remains one of the more exciting projects of this nature.?Polygon Proof-of-Stake blockchain to empower creators ad communities around the world with the capacity to launch social media platforms and profiles they own sounds like a good pitch.?Aave is worth watching.

As a Creator I could put down some roots, if I knew where to go. Aave wants to empower content creators to?"own their digital roots"?and calls for a more sustainable smart contracts-based social experience. I find it pretty hilarious.

If you enjoy Web 3.0 content, please join my Newsletter on substack about it that I'm growing out,?here.

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