The current social media landscape is flawed. No ownership, censorship and monopolies. Blockchain and NFTs have the potential to solve these issues and build the next generation of social media apps. 🔮
Most of us use Instagram, Twitter, TikTok or LinkedIn. We follow friends & strangers, post & like content and spent a lot of time to entertain or educate ourselves on these platforms. But what happens, when you decide to delete an account or if you move to the next big social media platform? You loose all your web interactions & relations (social graph). There is no way to safe and move everything to another platform. This leads to the first problem: The big tech players own you and your data.
Big tech cooperations can take everything away from you in an instant. For an average social media user, this may not look like a big problem, but creators are very dependent on them. Countless times, Instagram or Youtube closed accounts of creators without transparency. Five days after Facebook changed its name to Meta, an Australian artist lost access to her instagram account that documented nearly a decade of her life and work. Why? Because her Instagram handle was “metaverse”.
Another problem is that these social media companies collect data about you and make a lot of money out of it. But what about us? Why can’t we incentivise or monetise our content on social media platforms? Some web2 social media platforms already allow you to monetise your content, but most do not. They profit from you. If you are not profitable to them, they may even delete your account.
https://mashable.com/article/youtube-new-terms-of-service-no-longer-commercially-viable
web3 is the needed enabler to overcome web2 limitations. It enables digital asset ownership and creates opportunities for new business models. The goal of web3 social is to enable you to take your content and followers to any platform. Your whole identity is stored on the blockchain and you can decide who and how other companies can use it. So no big tech company has the complete control of your digital identity and cannot take everything away from you. You can also decide to monetise your digital identity and reward your fans / followers in various ways.
Lens Protocol by Aave provides the necessary infrastructure to build the next generation of social media apps. 🌿
It is a composable and decentralized social graph built on top of the Polygon blockchain. Composable means that you can build on top of it and a social graph is basically your web interactions & relations. Ultimately, Lens allows you to own your data. You can take it with you anywhere you want. You are unhappy with one social media platform? Just move your social graph to another platform.
When you first create your Lens profile, you actually mint an NFT stored in your wallet. Each time you follow a Lens profile, you get a "follow NFT" of that profile, which again is stored in your wallet. You can also collect posts for free or pay for it, depending on what the content creator decides to do. I already saw users posting their Art on Lens. I think, it is only a matter of time until there is also an NFT marketplace build on top of Lens.
Unfortunately, not everyone can mint a Lens profile yet. As of today ( October 10th, 2022), almost 77K Lens profiles were minted. If you are curious to test it, make sure to visit their homepage and sign up for the waitlist.
Orb, founded by Nilesh and Rohit, is a decentralized and permissionless social media network for web3 working professionals. It is the first mobile app built fully on the Lens Protocol and one of the best web3 mobile apps I have used so far. I am a firm believer that improving web3 mobile experiences is so important to reach mass adoption.
Orb lets you earn and show on-chain credentials. Each on-chain credential is a soulbound token (non-transferable NFTs). An example for such a soulbound token is your university degree, because your university degree will not hold the same value for someone else.
These on-chain credentials can be used to apply for job opportunities, and companies can use these on-chain credentials to filter for applicants.
Currently, Orb is on private beta. But they are planning to onboard more users soon. If you want to stay up to date, I would suggest to join their discord. You can find the discord link on their homepage.🪐
There is an obvious need for web3 social, but we have still a long way to go. Adoption of social dApps will not happen overnight for various reasons, such as:
Switching costs to dApps from established social media platforms for users is high
Most dApps have bad UX
However, if web3 social is done right, it has the possibility to change the internet for good. We live in an exciting time and I cannot wait to see what will be built next on top of Lens and other protocols.
Let’s connect, if you have a Lens profile already: