Lens launched with a promise: user-owned social profiles, composable creator tools, and a new social stack built for Web3. Now, 3+ years in, the community is asking a single blunt question, WTF is going on on Lens?
TDLR:
WTF is going on on Lens? 👀
Let us break it down ⚙
What the community is saying 💬
Challenges ahead ⚠️
Future outlook 🔮
The Bros’ Take 🤔
WTF is going on Lens Chain? 👀
Lens promised an open, permissionless social layer where users own identities and content. Instead, the community faces silence. Roadmaps are missing. Communication is sporadic and vague.
The garden of apps that once promised a thriving ecosystem now looks trimmed, a lot of creators, devs and Apps have left or slowed to a crawl.
Meanwhile, whispers turned into headlines: original Lens team members are moving to projects around the Base chain, and many core contributors are building elsewhere. The result is a platform that feels abandoned by those who once championed it.
Lack of transparency
Public updates are rare and thin. When the team does speak, messages read like boilerplate: “we are working hard”. After years of loyalty, the community demands clarity, not cosy PR lines. People want an honest roadmap, the treasury plan, and a clear path to meaningful governance.
Dev and creator exodus
Great builders left. Great creators left. Apps that once defined the Lens experience either migrated, paused development, or simply vanished. The ecosystem has dwindled from dozens of active projects to fewer than a handful that actually drive meaningful activity.
Lens team fragmentation
Several original team members have moved to Base-related projects. That matters. When builders and staff take their energy elsewhere, the product decays. Worse, the community senses that many people inside the Lens organisation do not even use Lens daily, which feels like a betrayal of the platform’s original ethos.
What still works ish
To be fair, Lens did ship a token rewards system that weekly distributes GHO to top users. That was not nothing. It provided a pulse of activity and a rare, visible win. But a rewards engine alone does not replace a roadmap or hands-on developer support.
The mood is ugly and clear. Here are the recurring asks and calls to action from OGs and builders:
Demand transparency: publish roadmap, treasury plans, path to DAO, and developer support details.
Hire a focused comms and growth team: someone to run weekly updates, manage socials, and host open community calls.
Separate rewards for builders and creators: make incentives sustainable, not a weekly lottery.
Consider an open letter and organised blackout as leverage (?) not to inflame, but to force an official reply and a timeline.
On top of that, voices inside the community urge practical fixes: a weekly public update cadence, a dedicated urgent channel for outages.
Relaunch the LIP process with clear incentives, and explore staking or integration with Aave for treasury transparency.
People want solutions, not salt.
Stable community or ghost town? Lens has a passionate core but has failed to hold a broader audience. Without active creators and mainstream content, network effects vanish.
Governance vs grind Governance asks (DAO, treasury rules) sound great on paper but require full-time people to manage properly. The community wants decentralised ownership yet the protocol lacks the operational team to make that happen without chaos.
Concentration risk A handful of projects still control the majority of activity. That makes the network fragile and easy to spook.
Reputation and migration When founders or early team members leave, forks, migrations or acquisitions become real outcomes. The threat is not theoretical, the community sees the talent drain and is already asking where the keys will go next.
Rewards are good, but not a strategy The GHO token rewards are a positive move, but they are only a bandaid. Weekly token drops have boosted short-term engagement but do nothing to rebuild product trust, developer tooling, or long-term user retention.
A few scenarios look most likely:
Resurgence via transparency: Lens leadership publishes a clear roadmap, hires core roles (SMM, developer relations), relaunches LIP incentives, and rebuilds trust. Community stays. Team refocuses. Slow, steady recovery.
Stagnation and slow drift: silence continues, key apps leave, engagement contracts further, Lens becomes a niche playground for die-hards while new networks eat fresh mindshare.
Acquisition or fork: either a corporate buyer steps in or the community forks Lens to another chain and takes the protocol forward without the original team. Both are messy but possible.
Pivot to rewards-only: Lens becomes a rewards-first destination: token mechanics drive activity rather than product quality. Short-term metrics may rise, long-term value will likely fall.
What the community wants most is a straight answer: are you committed or not?
If the team wants to hand the baton to the community, say it. If the team intends to double down, show the plan and the hires. Either is acceptable. Silence is not.
Building something onchain?
Let’s talk. TMB Labs is now offering full-stack growth support for blockchain, AI and social app projects.
Partnerships, strategy, content, socials, and more 👇🏽
Very bearish and very sad. Lens was a rare, beautiful experiment, profiles as NFTs, composable social, ownership of identity, and watching it fading is heartbreak for the people who built and believed.
That said, the community is the real asset here. Some people are leaving, but many brilliant creators, devs and organisers remain. They are loud, resourceful and relentless.
If Lens dies as a product, the community will carry its lessons elsewhere. If Lens wakes up and chooses transparency, hires, and a developer-first relaunch, there is a path back to relevance. Right now, the balance of evidence makes us cautious and frustrated. We want the dream to live, but we want the truth more.
Open letter ask, in plain terms: publish a roadmap, publish a treasury plan, hire a communications and developer relations team, separate builder rewards from user rewards, and commit to a public cadence of updates. If you will no longer run Lens, hand it to those who will.
That is the least the community deserves.
And that's it for today! Thanks for reading ♥️
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Last one. Lots of very cool things were promised, and even showed to us, presumably from the dev test chain. The majority of these were never mentioned at all in this year. A permissionless experience. They got that one right!! No permissions ever ran smoothly, so come shut down, it’ll have been a smooth run past great slideshows made in Canva by an intern. And here’s the real, top of the shit pile. Now, no one is fixing anything. The chain has to be moved, with a clockwork gear I suppose, and the friends and peers we spent hours with on Lens during the 7-8 months that there were no issues are just gone. Few relationships carried off chain because that’s what it was best at.
Continuing. I don’t know what happened with Stani, but in about 4mo he destroyed his reputation, which was for being a developer who kept the values of blockchain over personal problems. We were promised a vibrantly library of DApps. I don’t think they ever hit 10 functional without constant maintenance. Orb club iwnwrsbip was lost. My money lost. Oh and orb stickers. Again money lost because no one took time to try at all in the prior year…. Lens NFT Profiles became completely worthless. We were told they’d be migrated automatically, which was never attempted as far as anyone can tell. And, oh yeah. With all of these problems they asked users to give them more money for “verified accounts”we had those before, see my Lens name NFT remarks. Many excellent apps and their designers designed not to migrate. T2 had been an integral part of Lens for years on Polygon. We were promised all sorts of ID customization and usage. That apparently never got further than the Nicky po s from 2024
This is why I left for good at the start of September. Nothing on Lens Chain does what it’s supposed to do reliably over a week, or more often, a single day. Haven’t heard from Stani or Nilesh after the first month of Lens Chain. Nothing migrated like we were told it would. Even getting tokens on the Lens chain was an extreme hassle. The recommended defi swap return messages about liquidity constantly.. Orb absolutely bottomed out. Any attempt to reach support might net 1 reply that offered no solution. Hey.xtz tried hard, but were plagued with issues that could have easily been predicted in the year prior to Chain migration. Fountain had the makings of a great blog, but suffered from the rampantly ignored chain issues. Tips and mints worked rarely. I never received tokens that had announcements of tips. I don’t know what’s going on who th
The latest blog post by @trustmebroshow takes a hard look at Lens and reveals growing concerns within the community. What once promised user-controlled profiles and creative freedom has descended into silence, lack of transparency, and an exodus of valuable players. Calls for clarity, a roadmap, and improved communication are escalating as enthusiasm fades. The post discusses multiple potential futures for Lens, highlighting a path to resurgence through transparency or a worrying drift into obscurity. Seeking commitment from its team is crucial for its survival.