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A Look into Decentralized Social Networks
Xin Yi Lim
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Key Takeaways
22 min read

  • Decentralized social networks have grown significantly in the past months, with prominent protocols such as Lens Protocol, Farcaster and CyberConnect seeing growth in the number of users.

  • Users can access their social graph unlike in traditional social platforms, which gives users control over their social capital and monetization, as well as for developers to easily build on top of existing layers.

  • Lens Protocol and CyberConnect utilize smart contracts for their social graph while Farcaster is a network-based social graph - with each model having its own advantages and trade-offs.

  • There has been a number of raises for decentralized social networks protocols since the start of the year, coupled with the increase in social integrations for NFTs and DeFi protocols - suggesting that interest has been rising.

  • Despite this, a lot remains to be seen for true adoption as the current iterations of protocols still lacks in certain ways as compared to traditional social platforms.

Introduction

Social platforms are crucial to our daily lives as it is the main mode of communication between us and our networks. For many in the space, Twitter and Discord are two platforms that are indispensable due to the sheer amount of information and network effect enabled in these platforms. It is hard for users to give up these platforms given that they will lose their credentials and network, having to start from scratch on another. Hence, much of the space is highly vulnerable to these centralized platforms that could experience outages and interfere with how users interact with the platform without much resistance.

This is just one problem that decentralized social networks can solve. These networks aim to bring a new era...