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Our attention has become consumed by social media applications. They’re everywhere and we depend on them for both play and work. They let us build and maintain important relationships, express our unique selves and find our place amongst global communities. Given their dominance, and despite the backlash they often get, it can be hard to imagine a world without them.
However, here’s one possibility:
One of the next big social applications will be built on top of Lens Protocol, a social graph that’s user-owned, composable and decentralised.
To help you make sense of Lens Protocol’s ambitions and how it works, we’ll go through:
what a social graph is
the problems with the current state of social media
how social media could be different
how Lens Protocol works
What is a social graph?
A social graph is basically a map of people and all their relationships with others. Think about who your family, friend and colleagues are. Now figure out if any of them know each other, and who their friends are. That’s the start of your personal social graph. It’d be pretty complicated, pretty quickly.
Mark Zuckerberg started talking about social graphs in 2007. Back then, he said "it's the reason Facebook works" and "its changing the way the world works" (source). He was right. Social applications have taken over, and behind each one is a social graph.
What’s wrong with social media?
A lot of the backlash which social media applications gets stems from the fact that user data and social graphs are stored in each application’s private & siloed database.
The flow-on effects of this are that:
you don’t truly own the content you publish - platforms have the power to remove your content, or even remove you
you’re locked in - switching costs are high since there’s no easy way to move your content or following elsewhere
there’s less innovation in the market - it’s hard for new competitors to establish a meaningfully large social graph. Meanwhile, existing players are in a zero-sum battle to monetise your data & attention
For your day-to-day, this might not matter that much and probably isn’t top of mind. If anything, it could just be a little annoying at times. However, there are creators and businesses out there who depend on their social media reach and following to earn a living. Right now, they’re at the whims of centralised platforms.
For example: in 2021, Jack Butcher, who creates and sells digital educational products, had a number of his Twitter accounts suspended. Luckily, he managed to re-gain access, but at the time said: “All in all a tough pill to swallow, quite literally years of work, but fingers crossed for a fair resolution.”
What can we change about social media?
Lens Protocol’s ambition is to shift the power away from centralised platforms, and towards users, by giving them ownership over their content, social graph and data.
It’s designed to be user-owned, composable and decentralised:
user-owned - meaning you have full control your content, audience and network. You can take it anywhere, and no-one can take it away from you
composable - Lens Protocol isn’t building an application. Today’s social platforms have their own social graph but Lens Protocol is separating the social graph from the actual application, and making it publicly accessible. That way, it becomes a building block for anyone to build social applications on top of. Teams can focus on designing better experiences, instead of holding your attention
decentralised - meaning no entity has power over you and your content. If you don’t like one social platform, you can easily take everything you own to another
How does Lens Protocol work?
To be user-owned, composable and decentralised, Lens Protocol leverage the power of NFTs on the Polygon blockchain. Most of what’s possible with Lens Protocol will be familiar to you. After all, they’re creating building blocks, not an application.
You have profiles, and from profiles, you can publish posts, make comments, and mirror (i.e. re-post or re-share) content. Collectively, posts, comments and mirrors are known as publications. Of course, you can also follow and be followed other profiles, to build your audience and network.
The big difference with Lens Protocol, is that everything is stored as, and in, NFTs.
Your profiles? A Profile NFT with the history of all your publications.
Your publications? Also an NFT.
Follow another profile? You get a Follow NFT unique to that profile.
This might seem excessive, but beyond the arguably most important perk of having full ownership and control, NFTs lets us do some pretty cool things. For example:
publications can be collected as NFTs, which means creators can easily monetise any content they create. Example: Pussy Riot raised funds in support of access to reproductive care by letting users collect a proof of protest post.
you can design how others follow you and what it means, for example, maybe they need to pay to receive your Follow NFT, or you can give your followers voting power in your organisation
data is out in the open, for anyone to view and use, like this Lens Stats page which breaks down activity on Lens and the total revenue earned by users, or this dashboard
It’s still early days. Lens Protocol only launched in May 2022, but the building blocks are there now, so it’ll be interesting to see what gets built.
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