New Ideas for Decentralization Social Web

In 2017, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab asserted that decentralized social networks are difficult to succeed. They identified three main challenges: user acquisition and retention, personal information processing, and advertising models. At the time, these issues were considered almost insurmountable.

However, to this day, these "impossible" tasks seem to have become feasible. We are on the eve of the transformation of the concept of social media. This article will explore how innovative ideas in the Decentralization social ( DeSo ) field address these challenges:

1. Use open social graphs to solve the cold start problem.
2. Use identity verification and encryption technology to address user identity issues
3. Solve the income problem through token economy and incentive mechanisms.

Social Web and Cold Start Challenges

The initial challenge faced by social media platforms is how to attract users without a user base. The traditional approach is to achieve rapid growth through large-scale marketing and promotion, as Threads attracted 100 million users in just 5 days.

However, this approach is often difficult to sustain. After user attrition, the social graph and personal profiles accumulated by the platform also disappear. Emerging platforms need to repeat the arduous marketing process to rebuild the user network.

The root of this problem lies in the fact that in Web2 Social Web, the social graph ( is closely tied to the user relationships ) and the application itself. The two are interdependent: the novelty of the application drives the development of the social graph, which in turn becomes a moat for the application. Users are reluctant to leave mainstream platforms because "all their friends are there."

So, what would happen if we separate the social graph from the applications? Even if a certain application disappears, we can still easily launch new applications using the social relationships built on it. This is exactly the idea behind Web3's approach to the cold start problem.

Public Chains as Open Social Graphs

From a certain perspective, public blockchains like Ethereum are themselves a type of social graph. By looking at a specific address, one can understand its asset holdings, trading counterparts, and associated communities, etc., which can be referred to as "on-chain social profiles."

Some projects are exploring this idea. For example, Debank transforms on-chain data into readable "profiles" and adds messaging features to build a Social Web similar to a chat application. 0xPPL attempts to create a Twitter-like social platform using on-chain user profiles. By utilizing advanced language models, raw transaction data can be transformed into a form that is easy for ordinary users to understand.

Build Native Social Web Graph Protocol

Relying solely on public chain data has limitations, as this data is primarily focused on financial applications and may not be suitable for the Social Web. Therefore, one approach is to build a dedicated social graph protocol on top of the public chain.

Lens Protocol abstracts social interactions as on-chain actions such as "publishing", "commenting", and "mirroring". Farcaster also has similar abstractions, such as "cast", "reactions", and "amp". The main difference between the two lies in their technical implementations: Lens puts all content on the Polygon chain, while Farcaster registers its ID registry on the Ethereum mainnet, with the social graph operating in the form of a Delta graph on L2.

Cyberconnect focuses more on link aggregation (, including on-chain and off-chain sources ), and concentrates on initial application scenarios such as events and fan communities.

These protocols do not directly build top-level applications, but rather provide an open social graph layer. The essence is SDK. The advantage of this approach is that even if a successful application disappears, the social graph generated can still be used by other developers, and it only takes one success to launch the entire ecosystem.

Redesign Decentralization Social Web

The third strategy is to build decentralized solutions from scratch. The premise is that social media applications are the cornerstone of digital experiences and require dedicated blockchain or decentralized infrastructure, rather than being built on top of financially-oriented systems. In short, this is the "application chain" approach to social media.

DeSo is building an L1 blockchain focused on social applications. Unlike mainstream public chains that focus on "transactions per second," DeSo is dedicated to optimizing "posts per second," as well as the communication and storage needs of social applications. Based on this, DeSo plans to build a variety of social applications covering different forms, including long and short content, forums, and more.

Other decentralized social platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon, while not strictly based on blockchain, also adopt a similar redesign philosophy. Mastodon uses an email-like system, allowing users to choose between different service providers. Bluesky, on the other hand, is developed based on the open-source AT protocol and is essentially an open social graph API optimized for Twitter-style platforms.

The commonality among these projects is that they reject the existing public chain design represented by EVM, which is applicable to the Social Web. Although this approach offers more refined design and user experience control, it also severs potential connections with other mature elements of the Web3 ecosystem, such as DeFi and NFT communities.

In addition, the degree of decentralization of these solutions, as well as whether they can truly separate the social graph from the applications and attract diverse development teams, remains to be seen. This will be one of the key issues in the future development of Web3 Social.