The Future of Social Media Networks

Web3 unbundling trend

Web3 social media is the infrastructure layer for building empowered communities online. It is the crypto-native economy advancing. Why a blog focused on DeFi is talking about social media? Because we will see a lot of integration between these two worlds soon. So come with me in a quick overview of this new “enabler”. 

Lens Protocol, built on Polygon blockchain, is a key part of Web3 social. It was launched in May in a closed beta phase and almost 2 months later, it already has 44,000 profiles created. 

Source: Stani Presentation 

In Web2, there is no portability. Your profile, connections, and content are locked to a specific network and owned by a tech company. 

In Web3, we can have social media that is composable. Legos that enable multiple experiences with our digital identities. We own our data and we can control and monetize our content.

Source: Stani Presentation 

Lens unbundles the social media network, separating what is the experience layer from the protocol layer that guarantees the users` data ownership.

With this portability, it is much easier to have applications built on top of Lens Protocol. As the owners of their content, users no longer need to worry about losing their digital history.

Source: Stani Presentation 

It is important to understand how it works as it can enable multiple projects to use these legos. There are 3 basic types of NFTs: Profile NFT, Follow NFT and Collect NFT. 

The Profile NFT gives you control of your content. An address can contain multiple ProfileNFTs. The Profile NFT contains the history of all of the posts, mirrors (the equivalent of a "share" or RT), comments, and other content you generate. This ensures that all content created by a user remains user-owned and in their wallet. 

Every time someone follows you, it is issued a Follow NFT to that person. The ID of each newly issued Follow NFT for given profile increments by 1, such that the first follower's NFT has an ID of 1; the tenth has an ID of 10, and so on.

Follow NFTs have built-in governance capabilities, such as vote delegation, to allow for the creation of DAOs. Every follower you have is a potential member of the DAO to be formed.

The FollowNFT is the core building block of the Lens Protocol social graph, the social network map. 

The third one is the CollectNFT, which represents the collected publications. You can pay and collect the publications of other users, incentivizing them to produce more. 

It is just the beginning and there are interesting ideas for building on top of lens protocol. I selected one of them here:

“Today’s social media user experience is built for individuals. Current platforms are not designed for decentralized communities that may have different ways of organizing themselves. Imagine if Lens profiles could be owned and governed by DAOs or multi-sig wallets.” 

Source: https://ideas.lens.xyz/

Let’s say a group of seven people create a collective owned profile about healthy life and well being. After gathering some support and issuing FollowNFT to a growing follower base, they decide to start a DAO by just giving voting power to their followers. From the entrepreneurial spirit of founding fathers and mothers, a DAO is born with shared values. I am bullish on the combination of collective owned profiles with FollowNFT voting rights. Multiple startup societies can be born this way. 

DAOs are about technology but also social connections. With portable digital identity and history, Lens Protocol can foster the creation of new DAOs with shared values and facilitate trust-building between DAO members. Excited to see the communities that will emerge from this social innovation.