Decentralized social media: Is it the future, or is it tasteless?

Author: Polygon

Source: medium

People increasingly rely on social media for news, publications and entertainment. However, centralized players such as Facebook, Tiktok and Twitter have come under fire for exploiting user data and biased moderation. Web3 solutions have entered the field, and competing decentralized social media platforms are now vying to solve this 21st century problem. Questions have arisen around the possibility of moving to decentralized social media due to barriers to scalability and mass adoption.

status quo

Today, there are about 3.8 billion social media users, and the number of users is expanding every year as cheap mobile devices become ubiquitous around the world.

Source: Statista

While a part of everyday life, social media in its current form is almost as addictive and harmful as its benefits. Existing networks face criticism for biased moderation, exploitation of user data, addictive algorithms and siled ecosystems. Truly "fixing" social media requires a complete paradigm shift, and decentralized social media solutions are the closest we'll get to a truly democratized social space.

Rediscover social media from the ground up

web2 companies focus on social media as a single product, while web3 extends the concept of social networking to multiple levels. The base layer is the social graph: it maps profiles, followers and connections between them. Next is the application layer, where users can consume content and interact with their social graph. Referring to web2, regard the social graph as fans and the application layer as information flow. With blockchain, there is no single entity that controls the social graph. Instead, your social graph becomes an asset rather than a company-owned product.

Apparently, the allure of owning your own social graph isn't enough to convince billions of users to ditch their existing products. Given the growing dissatisfaction among users with social media policies and executives, there is a gap that needs to be filled. Beyond data ownership, complaints about fragmented followers, censorship, and closed-source algorithms present an opportunity for decentralized social media (DeSoc) to grab market share. Frankly, now is the perfect time to make the transition to DeSoc. Existing users demand a better experience, and DeSoc can serve as a catalyst for cryptocurrency adoption; the latter requires a popular product that can catalyze its early adoption phase.

Source: World Bank, Crypto.com

Solve the problem

Fans and networks in web2 are isolated in each application, while web3 social network allows you to bring your fans to each application. Imagine how easy and time-saving it would be if you could get all your YouTube subscribers to follow you instantly when you launch an Instagram page for your brand. This is the benefit of decoupling the social graph from the application layer; your graph remains the same, while the application layer is flexible. With future customizability, the possibility of self-authorized fan transfers can be easily implemented, where only selected fans can be ported over.

This idea of owning your own network becomes even more important when discussing moderation and censorship. Donald Trump was banned from Twitter and went on to create his own social media app: Truth Social. With this transition, he lost his existing fans. The situation is still much worse for individuals who are not political figures, who risk losing their livelihoods due to social media bans. Competing DeSoc applications are experimenting with various auditing techniques to stay within the law and avoid excessive web2 auditing.

The Lens protocol is a social layer built on Polygon, which can be said to be the best mode of review: hand over the right to review to the application layer that publishes content. If a user is banned or censored at the application layer, they can simply move to another protocol that provides a similar experience. Users can keep all their followers as if nothing happened. Now, instead of turning social media companies into arbiters of truth and hate speech, users can engage with any front end willing to accept their content. This is a true free market experience.

The final piece of the social media puzzle requires solving algorithmic problems. Today, popular social media apps are arguably worth more than gold, preventing their algorithms from leaking into the public domain. However, these algorithms are designed to be as addictive as possible. Your data is how these companies make money, but your time is how they get more data. Currently you have no control over these algorithms. If you want to see more inspirational videos one day, or a less addictive algorithm another day, there's no way you can do it. In the DeSoc protocol, individuals can create open-source algorithms or multiple application layers with different algorithms, giving users greater control over what they see. Not only is this a step forward in customizability, but it's potentially groundbreaking for the next generation of social media users, so that they don't become as addicted as Gen Z users are today.

DeSoc Trilemma

While it looks like DeSoc is the answer to all the problems of web2 social media, there is no perfect solution. Yes, DeSoc solves the problems mentioned above, but it introduces its own set of complexities. We coined the term "DeSoc Trilemma" to emphasize the trade-offs made in designing the DeSoc protocol in terms of security, scalability, and user experience (UX). With a slight twist on Vitalik's "blockchain trilemma," none of the protocols we reviewed successfully optimized all three of these characteristics.

Security and Scalability

Most importantly, security speaks to two things in this trilemma: the decentralization of the blockchain, and the execution of transactions. Decentralization of the blockchain is simple: with more validators, the blockchain becomes more decentralized and secure. However, this requires a trade-off between security and scalability. The more decentralized and secure a blockchain is, the harder it is to scale. This explains why no DeSoc protocol can actually run on Ethereum, because the gas fee is too high and the network will become too congested. Before ZK-rollup becomes cheap and usable, the DeSoc protocol needs to run on sidechains, subnets/supernets, or standalone L1. The most secure blockchains aren’t the best places for DeSoc protocols to be deployed, but to be fair, unlike DeFi protocols, these don’t necessarily require Ethereum’s security.

Security vs User Experience

When it comes to the execution of transactions, some DeSoc protocols execute the transactions themselves. For example, if a user follows someone, they only need to sign a message. They do not pay gas fees, nor actually execute transactions, but the protocol itself assumes this role. This requires a trade-off between security and user experience. Blurring gas costs is a big step forward for user experience. Imagine having to pay a fraction of Instagram's AWS bill every time you wanted to post! In fact, the ultimate user experience is that you connect the wallet, but never have to deal with the metamask window popping up prompting you to sign a contract or pay for a transaction. The price of doing this is to allow smart contracts to gain more authority and control over the wallet, and smart contracts are at risk of being hacked. While promoting mass adoption, it goes against the decentralized nature of web3. User experience is arguably the biggest point of friction in cryptocurrency adoption; maximizing decentralization may need to be looked at differently in order to foster widespread adoption.

In fact, Lens' gas-free API is industry-leading when it comes to the trade-off between security and user experience for executing transactions. The API allows users to perform transactions on the blockchain network without paying any fees. This makes DeSoc comparable to free-to-use web2 social media. Reducing the need for users to wait for transactions to complete, the gas-free API allows them to scroll to the next release and continue interacting freely.

The API allows a user to simply sign a message (eg, as a comment), and the relayer receives the message and associated information, uploads the data, and completes the transaction. This approach is slightly more gas-intensive for relayers, since they have to verify the signature and then publish the data on-chain. However, it makes the user experience more fun and satisfying. Application layer platforms are required to pay gas fees, which means that Lenster or LensFrens is obliged to pay these fees. While the downside of using a gas-free API is that users rely on relayers to post transactions on-chain rather than completing transactions themselves, the trade-off is worth it given that social media postings don't require the same level of security as financial transactions. In addition, relayers also add flexibility, with a one-hour grace period to officially publish transactions on-chain, they can avoid periods of high gas fees.

User Experience vs Scalability

The trade-off between user experience and scalability is harder to analyze. For example,DeSo (not to be confused with DeSoc), a blockchain created specifically for social applications. DeSo has scaled to over 1.5 million users (far more than the 50,000+ users of competitors like Lens), but it lacks the surrounding ecosystem, such as games and DeFi protocols, that could benefit Polygon users.

Imagine being able to use your Lens profile on Polygon as collateral in a DeFi protocol to get a loan. This value-added composability advantage does not exist in DeSo or any DeSoc protocol built on independent blockchains. Likewise, Cyberconnect is extremely scalable, with over 1 million accounts, because it is blockchain agnostic, allowing you to bring your social graph to any blockchain. However, due to design reasons, Cyberconnect cannot use NFTs within its ecosystem. Losing NFT compatibility is a huge loss while saving computation and simplifying the overall design process.

Take Lens as an example, NFT represents your profile and your fans. It enables secondary sales of profiles, creating a whole new market. Don't want to create a meme account with a huge following? You only need to buy an NFT profile that can satisfy these users. Additionally, NFTs provide creators with more income. By making posts collectible, creators can introduce exclusivity and thus charge for content.

Can decentralized social media become a reality?

Decentralized social media may offer the only realistic solution to the challenges users face on existing web2 social media platforms.

But the question remains: is mass adoption possible? On the face of it, maximizing decentralization will have to fly the white flag in order to prioritize user experience and scalability so that DeSoc can finally see sustainable product-market fit. The correct approach seems to be to separate the social layer from the application layer to further drive customizability and avoid the moderation issues that exist in web2.

Finally, by building ecosystems beyond social media on the blockchain (such as gaming and finance), and leveraging NFTs in design, prioritizing composability can achieve the best possible user experience while delivering on today's social media designs An option not available in .