The idea of decentralized social (DeSo) media is back in the news with the Elon Musk deal to buy Twitter back on, so I wanted to dive deeper into how this would work. I touched on this at a high level in March, right before Elon announced his offer to buy Twitter. We have also seen a few platforms gaining traction that are worth discussing in this space. It was time for a more detailed look.
The basic concept of a decentralized social network is that users would set up a profile tied to their Crypto wallet. Today when you build a profile on Twitter or Instagram your profile is carried on their server and subject to their rules. A decentralized profile would be yours and would not belong to a social media company.
You would then follow other people’s decentralized profiles, and this follow would move with you as you move to different social platforms. The same would work the other way. People would attach themselves as followers of your profile. When you start on a new platform today, you start with zero followers and following no one else. Decentralized social would fix this. If you follow a friend or celeb on one platform, this will simply move to a new one with you when you connect your wallet.
Another key tenet of decentralized social is that your posts would go publicly onchain. When you post today to LinkedIn or TikTok, your post is going to their server tied to your profile there. With DeSo, you will post to the blockchain in a way that any app built on that protocol will be able to grab and display that post. The idea is that the content lives separately from the platform that people view the content on.
This means that it will be easy for app builders to create new consumer versions of social networks. New apps will be able to grab the public posts of any creator from the blockchain, and they can then decide the algorithm they want to use to display that content to their users. This will work whether the content is text, pictures, videos, or audio. This will allow apps to wrap the content around topics (sports, lifestyle, business, etc) or creators or just a timeline or whatever they can imagine. It will give tons of freedom for creativity and allow the best apps to win.
The biggest challenge for app builders in DeSo is that there are effectively no barriers to entry. Anyone can spin up a new app, snag all the content, and immediately duplicate the social graph. The pressure will be on these apps to constantly innovate and build a great experience for their users to retain them. It should be wild but a ton of fun.
There is a good example of how this works from before web3 in the podcast space. It’s not onchain, but it works in much the same way. Podcast creators today post their audio file to a hosting company, which creates an RSS feed to that content. Apple and Spotify take those RSS feeds and build consumer facing apps to allow people to listen to those podcasts. However, there are dozens, maybe hundreds, of apps created for exactly this purpose. Any new app developer can snag the public RSS feeds and serve up these podcasts to their users without the permission of the podcast creators. The big difference is between podcast feeds and onchain DeSo is that the follow graph doesn’t move from platform to platform. If you follow How I Built This or The Pomp Pod on Apple and chose to switch to Spotify, then you’ll have to manually follow those shows again on Spotify. With a DeSo protocol, Spotify would know which shows you like the second you connect your wallet. Cool, amiright?
There are a few companies building the protocols for decentralized social media. I’ve been experimenting this week with Farcaster. I heard their founder Dan Romero on this Pod of Jake episode recently. It feels a lot like Twitter. You create your profile, which is built on their protocol instead of the company’s server, and you post text or pictures. It allows for a new, clean follow graph. It’s mostly web3 and tech topics, which I like. Right now, Farcaster is still in a closed Beta. Their app needs to be accessed via TestFlight, an iPhone testing app. To get access, you have to DM with Dan on Twitter and ask to be let in. I did that, and Dan responded immediately and got me set up. Still early days, but it’s been a good experience for me so far.
Another DeSo platform worth watching is Lenster, which is built on the Lens Protocol. You can catch their founder Stani Kulechov on this episode of the Mint podcast. I believe this one only works today on your computer. I tried it out, but I didn’t get a ton of traction and didn’t love using it on my PC. Still, there is something good going on here and it bears consideration. Lenster is built on Aave, which is a L1 with a $1Bn market cap. Stani is the founder of both Aave and Lenster. They have serious resources to make a go of it.
In the prior post, I spoke about the DeSo protocol. Their first popular app was Bitclout, which set up creator coins and tried to get users to buy those coins. It had a bit of an internet minute of fame but has since come crashing to earth. The $DESO token has had a wild ride following the overall Crypto markets. It peaked in the $135 range with a market cap approaching $1Bn, but $DESO now sits at $17 with a $150MM market cap. The company just announced a $200MM cap raise and has said they intend to build wallet-to-wallet communications next. Keep an eye on this one as well. **Note, I own a small amount of $DESO tokens. Please do your own research. This is not an endorsement.**
Things are still early in the development of decentralized social networks. I’m experimenting with these, and you might want to play around too. Maybe something will hit next year.
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