Powered by DeFi, NFTs and Web 3.0, Decentralized Social Media Seeks to Unseat Tech Giants

Decentralized finance lending platform Aave has launched a new social media protocol it hopes will take the likes of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok into the open-source, tech-giant-free world of Web 3.0.

Unlike many other projects in the growing field of decentralized social media, Lens Protocol is not an app so much as it is a framework upon which social media projects can be freely built. Everything is based on non-fungible tokens (NFTs), starting with user-controlled profiles that “contain the history of all posts, mirrors, comments and other content you generate,” Lens said. That means you can take your profile with you.

All content like images, music and video will be held in non-fungible tokens, and even follows and likes, will be NFT-based. That means you can take your followers with you — a big deal to many longtime crypto builders and users.

With the modest Twitter announcement “Today everything changes,” Lens Protocol promised “familiar social media functions like having a profile, commenting, resharing a post, and more — but unlike social media of the past, Lens Protocol is powered by NFTs, so you own and control all of your content.”

The Next Web

This brings two questions to mind: What is Web 3.0, and what is a Defi lending/borrowing platform doing creating a social media platform?

See also: Musk, Dorsey Hint VC Money Puts Web3 Vision at Risk

Now, we’ve gone into Web 3.0, also known as Web3, before, but the short version is that it’s blockchain’s next-generation version of the web, where peer-to-peer data storage and sharing will allow the development of decentralized, smart contract-controlled DApps that let people communicate and share content without the need for “trusted” third-party control by the likes of Meta and Google.

Read more: PYMNTS DeFi Series: What is Yield Farming and Liquidity Mining?

As for the second question, well, yeah. One answer is that much of DeFi ultimately hopes to move to a Web 3.0 world, where the only governance is by vote and there is — in theory, anyway — no way to censor anything.

Another is that Aave apparently had developers with the interest, time and financial wherewithal to build Lens. It is, they promise, designed to be easy to build upon.

Own Your Audience

Lens Protocol is hardly the first decentralized social media project. Most notably Block CEO Jack Dorsey launched Bluesky when he still ran Twitter. The goal of Bluesky was to create an open-source, decentralized platform on which social media apps — including Twitter.

Which was an interesting idea for a social media company that makes its money by collecting data on its customers so it can send them ads.

In July, Aave founder and CEO Stani Kulechov told Decrypt, “We believe that content creators should own their audiences in a permissionless fashion.”

Pointing out that Twitter users don’t own their audiences, Kulechov added, “Twitter makes all the revenue from your tweets and the content you share, and Twitter decides which of your tweets get traction through the algorithm.”

There are plenty of blockchain-based decentralized social media platforms, most of which try to mimic one or more specific tech giants. Facebook has Dispora and MeWe, YouTube has LBRY and D.Tube, and Minds goes after both. Mastodon is a Twitter replacement and Aether is gunning for Reddit.

DeSo, a decentralized social blockchain is “built from the ground up to scale decentralized social applications to one billion users” — which it does not have yet, but hopes to. It has a market capitalization of more than $400 million and some 100 DApps have been built on it.

Absolute freedom

Which brings up the biggest selling point and “yes, but” aspect of decentralized social media. It’s censorship proof. That became a huge issue in both the 2020 presidential election and currently with vaccine misinformation, as Twitter, Facebook and other social media platforms started taking down content and blocking or banning posters.

One place many decamped was to Facebook/YouTube alternative Minds, which raised $10 million in June. It’s mentioned in a lot of articles about free speech, but also a fair number about hate speech.

Free speech and censorship remain a big deal among crypto content producers and their followers after years in which the main social media platforms regularly and without explanation would ban popular channels and delete content, and Google would not accept any related ads.

Immutable blockchains and cryptocurrency payments make it possible to bypass the big social media platforms’ censorship — both in terms of outright bans but also algorithm changes that can make a post harder to find — but it also means there is no way for anyone to do anything about anything from IP theft and slander to hate speech and outright crime like scam ads and phishing posts. Except, of course, move to a different platform.

Which is one of the things Lens Protocol says it will make easy. After all, you can just pick up your avatar, posts, likes, and media and take it to another platform.