Panel discussion: The Future of Decentralized Social

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:12

   what is decentralized social okay cool well um thanks everyone for coming and thanks for for inviting me here and having me here I guess decentralized social is essentially just socialized we know it just built with decentralized Technologies and that's kind of the most concise way out but I guess I think like the interesting question is what are the value that it brings to the user does the developers

2. 0:37

   as well in and like why would you know we want more and more people to care about that I think there's two main you know buckets of people just like you mentioned there's developers and there's users and I think that both of them combined um Can potentially spark a lot of innovation and a lot of really interesting apps that are being built and a lot of people that kind of uh have missed and maybe lost their profiles and

3. 1:04

   and their identity in different ways or maybe just are tired of rebuilding their presence across new social apps every time a new one launches um can kind of like get a lot of value out of out of web through social so I guess from the perspective of a user one of the interesting things is that with uh traditional social every time a new application comes online Tick Tock Instagram Facebook Twitter whatever you have to kind of rebuild your social graph and a lot of people have kind of

4. 1:36

   been able to do that but it's actually time consuming and it's kind of annoying to have to do that over and over so with web3 social decentralized social so your follower graph is following you essentially across all the new applications that are built on that Network so for lens we have over 100 uis that are built I would say around 10 or so or probably production ready in terms of like competing with something like Twitter but that's still a decent number

5. 2:01

   considering the protocol still in closed beta and it's only been around for about a year so when a new experience Launches on a web 3 social protocol then you have new ways to express yourself you might have like an exciting new way to kind of create content and you don't have to actually invest years of your time rebuilding your audience to try it out you can try it out that day and if you like it you stay there if not it doesn't

6. 2:24

   really matter because you don't have to kind of invest all that time another thing is just knowing that you can go to sleep at night and wake up the next day knowing that your profile is not going to go away like no one could delete your profile it's just impossible because that's just how blockchains work people have had their profiles stolen or deleted or I guess you could get your profile hacked in web 3 if your wallet attacks

7. 2:48

   but um no one can actually just go in and decide that you're no longer going to be on the platform Elon Musk tweeted a few months ago that if you tweet about certain things then you're going to get uh your your um I guess profile bin so one of those things was if you were going to be talking about other social networks then your your profile could be banned and imagine like building up your your

8. 3:12

   Following over the course of like five or ten years and then someone arbitrarily coming up with a reason why they can take away your profile and then also people that live in countries where they're they're afraid to speak out about government stuff potentially being censored is an issue that some people might have um but I think one of the most interesting things is that you can experiment with a lot of different applications without having to rebuild

9. 3:37

   your audience and then there's also the whole aspect of monetization so you have the ability to connect directly with your followers and be able to earn money um so with this idea of like a collect it was just kind of like in the the same I mean we've probably heard collects but uh in the past people were more focused on like nfts that were like really expensive and maybe like a few people would participate in that ecosystem but with the scale of something like web3 with hundreds of thousands or millions

10. 4:08

    of users you can actually have collects that cost 25 cents 10 cents or a dollar that add up to a lot that can provide a lot of like value to both the person that's creating as well as collecting so for example we've had people that have uh just posted something like they would on Twitter and they've set a collect feed like a dollar and they've had tens of thousands of people collect that so for something that took them a few seconds to write they made like twenty thousand dollars and you just can't do

11. 4:35

    that directly uh through traditional social yeah I think I mean definitely to kind of contrast you know decentralized social we just saw threads launching right and you needed to rebuild your social graph there again yeah and who knows like a year or two from now yeah how popular threads will be Earth it'll even be there at all yeah yeah I mean Google Plus is a great example like Google Plus launch to build all your like I build a bunch of circles you know all those things and then like ah never mind it's not not an interesting right

12. 5:06

    so I think there's definitely you know the platform risks but oh like it is indeed not the biggest attractor right and so the question is for for the getting adoption at least like I personally think users will not be the first who will like go after it right it is a developers who actually want to build in this environment and it's easier for them to build um and so I guess I mean obviously you are on defrost side so you believe in the same thing but it's interesting to

13. 5:38

    have an explore kind of what what is the benefits developers get if they can build on this more open social infrastructure and how does that link to the you know eventual user adoption okay so first of all the idea of like social is way way more compelling as a use case than anything else in in blockchain and and web3 at all because everyone in the world 4.95 billion people on the internet all are already using social applications so it's not something you

14. 6:09

    have to explain and get them to understand it's something they can pick up and grock right away and now if we want to kind of bring a application that the average person would want to use it needs to be as good or better than what they're already using in the past so therefore we have to provide like the user experience that is as good or some or better than something like Twitter and I think that with the combination of a lot of the improvements that we've

15. 6:33

    been seeing at the infrastructure and and the UI layer I would say with uh all types of stuff that are happening around account abstraction but also gasless transactions and Timeless transactions meaning that you can kind of like authorize posts that are non-financial to be sent through and authentication or access token as opposed to signing a transaction you can provide like the same user experience or better than a

16. 6:58

    traditional social app so you have for the first time a use case that is accessible and understood by everyone in the world world that also leverages and gives a lot of benefits that are not possible through centralized infrastructures so for people that are wanting to build applications that can potentially become popular um this is really compelling for a lot of developers so we have hundreds of

17. 7:23

    developers already building on lens probably thousands I would say because we have hundreds of apps and um it's really simple to also get started building and for developers I would say some of the main value propositions are first of all you don't have to build your entire ecosystem from scratch you already have a hundred thousand or so built-in users in closed beta in the future that would be probably I'm we're guessing right Millions because once anyone can sign up it'll be permissionless so you have like this built-in user base so you don't have to

18. 7:55

    bootstrap that from scratch number one number two you don't have to build out the infrastructure yourself either if you've ever built in traditional like web 2 or whatever you would want to call that um you might have used services like auth zero for authentication and authorization you might have used twilio for messaging you might have used AWS serverless functions for execution uh you might have used something like versel for continuous integration you

19. 8:20

    have all these cloud services that abstract away a lot of complex functionality so you can focus on delivering something cool and that's kind of what web3 social infrastructure does it provides an uh layer for um all of these features that you would want to build but you don't have to build them from scratch so you can just focus on building your mobile app or your web app you don't have to build any

20. 8:44

    back-end at all you don't have to have a back-end developer you don't have to have a database engineer you don't need a QA engineer you don't need any of that stuff on the back end so you can come in as a team of one and we already have teams of one raising at millions of dollars like for apps that they're that they've built which is crazy on lens and it's only possible because they don't have to build out that infrastructure they're just it's just less work so you

21. 9:07

    can build faster you can iterate more quickly you can do so with less people you already have that built-in audience and one of the things that that we're doing and I think that other web 3 social like products should do is provide like a really high quality developer experience so you can't expect them to interact directly with the blockchain you want to give them apis you want to give them sdks you want to

22. 9:31

    give them tools and all types of stuff where they can easily and quickly build applications so combining all that stuff together people are coming to hackathons and building stuff and some of those apps are getting funded and some of them are becoming successful and it's just like a completely different area I think of expertise than what we've traditionally seen which is mainly like Financial

23. 9:56

    but I think that the interesting thing here because you can as a team of one build something interesting and at the same time you're leveraging this common platform you don't need now to build a venture scale startup you don't need to aim for you know your own tens of millions hundreds of millions of users you can be targeting a more Niche kind of use cases and still leverage all the

24. 10:19

    same infrastructure that you know as if you were like targeting hundreds of millions of users right so I think like that's the really interesting benefit here that kind of decouples almost the part like you know if you're trying to build Facebook like compete with Facebook right you need to be able to scale to that you need to hire you know similar like Workforce you need to have all those things and here you kind of have that in

25. 10:43

    more decentralized way like more people contributing to the core protocols and then you can actually focus on the specific use case that you want to deliver on and then you know that becoming kind of a platform of many of those use cases I think from my perspective I think the adoption will come through more of this Niche use cases working together versus like one that actually like heads on competes with like Twitter or Facebook because the reality is like those are pretty

26. 11:08

    good and like the the use case of like deep lateralization sadly is I mean not sadly it's good it's not very popular but like it you know it only like people only care about deep being deep platformerized when they get that right and mostly they don't but I think this Niche use cases where you can like hey you know we're niching community and we really want to have our own economy thrown together and like we want to connect to Social and we want to build

27. 11:34

    something around that right like right now building that right would be like really expensive because you need to do all of the stack and maintain it and manage it and you need to get users to join and I think using this decentralized social as kind of a concept and leveraging some of the sdks API so it really allows yeah like a team of mine to put it together there's always this chicken and egg problem like you build something that it's if it's

28. 11:56

    social and you want users but people don't want to join unless there's already people there so what happens when you build something from scratch you have to kind of start completely over so starting from a big user base is like a big value prop for sure exactly yeah so you mentioned monetization right I think there's interesting because there's like different aspects of meditation there's like let's say there's new shoes case I'm a developer building and like maybe raising money or not but also there's a Creator side

29. 12:21

    right which you know and we see Twitter is kind of trying to innovate on this and like others obviously there's you know some of the pencil and others who've been trying to do this for a while like how do you see kind of web3 like kind of you know it was to me it's really interesting because web series like in theory has should have been replacing patreon like you know years ago but it still hasn't happened so like

30. 12:46

    what is what do you think in in the you know from the decentral social lens uh like where do you see this kind of Creator monetization going well there's a lot of stuff you can do you can do stuff directly on the platform already and you can essentially obviously connect with people and pay them because you already have their address you can send payments to them you can support them by collecting the stuff that they're they're building you can

31. 13:09

    actually share stuff on lens and set a collect fee to go to someone else and raise money permissionlessly without them even knowing for example we posted an image that was created for us that we paid the artist to create and then we shared it separately and we set the collect address to them and for one dollar you could collect and they made like a few tens of thousands of dollars

32. 13:34

    maybe like 10 or 15 000 or something like that from that directly native to the platform and I think it would just make really a lot of sense to have your follower graph integrated into a payment app like I don't know like cash app or venmo because those are my friends and my social graph already maybe I want to send send them some money and then I add a new person and they're now like my my social graph as well it could be like a follower there's just a lot of um

33. 13:59

    opportunity when you have all of these things already interconnected that you don't have to start again rebuilding from from scratch yeah for sure and I think the interesting question is like how do we go beyond that like we I mean we have the stock engagement communities right that existed but like then the nfts themselves became like a whole speculation game but the communities

34. 14:22

    were on Discord they were on you know forums like they were not using like they were not really connected to the kind of the decentralized tissue that you have and so I think there's an interesting question as kind of just decentralized social stack matures you have more and more native kind of use cases where potentially you know you borrow a token to participate in a community while you're playing a game and then you know like while you entered this room on chain for example in the game you are like part of this

35. 14:54

    chat and group like where you can see what people are discussing like things like that like become more kind of integrated and composable right that right now again like if you try to like you would only build that in your own Silo it would not be able to build that as kind of a big Network yeah we uh we're seeing already for instance orb has orb communities so if you hold like certain nfts you already entered you're automatically entered into a community

36. 15:17

    and they have a really beautiful user interface to browse the communities that you're in so for example the first one was around eat Denver when this thing launched and you could see all the activity from anyone that was Eddie Denver within its own feed developer now has its own feed on orb so anyone that's a developer dial is posting there and it's kind of like a separate tab in the mobile app and um yeah there's a lot of uh I think I would say Focus around

37. 15:40

    exactly that right now for us to kind of make that even better yeah I mean for me also like I always said you know for me Dao's are Facebook groups with a bank account except they didn't have the like actual social part like you know if you go to Dallas like it's just proposals and votes and there's no like the discussion about why are we doing it what are we doing it and that all the discussions happen somewhere else and everything's

38. 16:05

    on Discord yeah everything was in Discord you know people there have no like you know that kind of build interestability for that you know like yeah I mean there's color blend a few other tools to like kind of Link these things but it's all very disconnected I think that yeah as this kind of structure is now you have you know discussion maybe is then like during his Denver the community is like pulls together money maybe helps find like few

39. 16:28

    more people to come in to the city things like that right you can have like a more interactive kind of decision making and action uh happening yeah we're we're also working on kind of like different widgets and stuff that can be integrated into other applications to create conversations so there's like discus have you heard of disco yes so we're basically building out kind of like a discus like widget that is all

40. 16:52

    essentially on on lens and um and other social networks could build something similar and I think that's a really cool use case as well so speaking of widgets uh so we I mean you've seen our kind of blockchainberry system front ends uh and so there's actually already lens components available there yeah one of the winners of the hackathon that we just had was had built one of those yeah

41. 17:14

    yeah it was really cool and so I think that the interesting thing here is there can be multiple decentralized social protocols but because they're all open they're all interoperable they all can work together there's no actual limitation of like hey Twitter and Facebook will never be able to like interface and interact and so I guess like the interesting question is and and I think uh kind of there's actually that

42. 17:39

    winner is actually working on the next thing which is merging lens feed and near social feed into one place so you can actually have you know like different protocols feeding into one feed and then you can have kind of different ranker algorithms and stuff like this around that so I think that's one of the points is like open open is like you know you can when you're already in an open web open

43. 18:02

    world right you can now kind of really compose these things in an easy way and then build up yeah different front engines and pull them in into different existing web 2 applications as well so you can have all this compatibility that uh you don't really have or like it you know sometimes you have Facebook head apis and then they decided not to have them and they don't have this change of the rules yeah I think one of the worst things about

44. 18:26

    building on someone else's apis that you just don't know what's going to happen the next day it could be completely cut off or shut down forever they could jack the price up like we saw recently with Twitter and Reddit companies going out of business because everything just completely changed but when the data is public and open you can do whatever you want yeah I mean for those who've like been using Twitter for a while like there's a tweet tweet deck right it was the app that for a while was uh like a

45. 18:51

    pretty preferred actually UI for Twitter but then Twitter changed their API rules and that company I think it either went out of business I needed but it was one of those big ones yeah yeah like they really needed to like pretty much shut down their business because they're it like they couldn't uh hold API for the costs they were offering to the user and so that's kind of yeah very interesting case where there's a experience that was like literally built by a smaller team

46. 19:17

    better than the core team of Twitter and and they kind of just like you know in a way destroy their company yeah because the value is Flowing outside of their client their advertising and stuff like that so they just Jack it up to the point where either if they pay it they're going to still make a ton of money or if they don't pay it they don't care because those users are going to obviously end up coming back to their app and that's the whole thing like you have no control

47. 19:41

    over that with any of this stuff um you can you can wake up tomorrow they could change you could be using it for 10 years they could change the recommendation algorithm and you can now get a feed of like content that you just absolutely hate I think that a lot of the game from experience yeah I think a lot of people have been complaining in the last six months some people actually are not some people like it you know but that's the thing like you don't have a choice either you like it you hit it you don't have a choice the recommendation

48. 20:05

    algorithm on Twitter has changed it's showing more like inflammatory content fighting videos stuff like this some people don't want to see that stuff and you don't really have a choice but with public data anyone can build a recommendation algorithm and there can be a Marketplace of recommendation algorithms and this isn't theoretical this is literally already what's happening there's dozens about recommendation algorithms now available for lens all these clients are picking

49. 20:29

    up their own you can pick and choose which one you want to use and then um you as a user are not locked in you can build your audience continue building your following and it consume the content in the way that you like yeah and I think that I mean this is definitely powerful again in this open world where we really trying to get user to have a choice and kind of be able to decide what they want right and right

50. 20:53

    now kind of yeah like there's a lot of small decisions that as a user you don't actually know even that you had an option because like the product just decides for you and like it Optima like all those products are optimized for maximizing revenue for the company yes like at the end and this is interesting because like you know people actually in the traditional web 2 world like makes make fun of decentralization for the

51. 21:17

    longest time but what you saw on threads a week ago is that they are now pivoting to a model of decentralization they're now Implement they want to implement activity Pub for this for the stated reason of being able to Port your social graph into different client applications also supposedly censorship resistance even the activity Pub can be censored literally someone can go and delete your profile but their stated purpose now on

52. 21:43

    threads from the CTO is that they want to move into a decentralized architecture Jack Dorsey founded Twitter then he founded blue sky and now he's found in Noster moving more into the area of decentralization here you have the two biggest Founders in the entire world of social both moving into decentralization but the decentralization architecture that they're building is not permissionless

53. 22:08

    it's not mutable and it's not sensorship resistant so they recognize that the value of the problem they still want some control so I think that's a really bullish actual case even though we don't like a lot of the stuff that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter have done in the past seeing the biggest social companies in the world move in that direction is a very very strong signal that we're on the right track

54. 22:33

    yeah and I think I mean for a lot of them it's also this interesting conundrum where uh kind of as more users come right there's more difference of opinions and some things are become not safe and kind of you need to now moderate and create some you know form of trust and safety and the problem is like you know Facebook needed to pretty much moderate the world right and like it's very different like they needed to have an opinion on every like as a company they need to have an opinion on

55. 23:04

    every single thing happening in the world right and that opinion like it always would be wrong because there's always like multiple sides about something right and so they were always under constant attack same happened with Reddit same as with Twitter right and so there the reality is like the centralized platforms are also not able to and like they kind of shouldn't be in position of becoming the moderators of the world right of the conversation like Elon Musk his kind of narrative around

56. 23:34

    taking over Twitter was that like hey they're tensoring you know and delimiting the um kind of freedom of speech but then he himself starts like well you're going to be banned for this or you're going to be like kicked out for that or don't talk about this right and it's like well that's kind of non-consistent and so the question here like again with this like you can have different applications which kind of represent different

57. 23:57

    communities you can also have more kind of community moderation where that you know for different aspects maybe different like community members and leaders can be deciding what what are the things and you can be choosing which leaders you follow yeah you're you actually have have the choice yeah you have the choice so you're going back is a kind of yeah core value of what we're trying to do is open

58. 24:20

    the web so I think that's extremely important as uh we're doing it and this is why like actually although threads and blue sky are saying they wanna kind of like you know put it on activity uh Pub Etc they're not actually doing that they're not actually like going all all in into the like well one of the problems with activity Pub in the implementation of Mastodon is that you have these um you have the people that are running each server have full control over

59. 24:51

    everything so for instance they can read all of your direct messages like they're not encrypted and they can see everything that's happening they can ban you for arbitrary reasons so for instance um uh someone I follow that has a big following on Twitter got on that got on Mastodon and a week later he was banned because someone thought he was a capitalist whatever that means and he literally had his account deleted and that was it and it wasn't a name

60. 25:17

    low in the main server oh I don't really know what's I don't know enough about it but I just thought that was like really really stupid yeah for for something that was like yeah pretty much claiming to be a replacement for for Twitter's kind of censorship uh that was a very bad move yeah so so exactly I think like leveraging you know the old innovation blockchain technology that you know people have been building is definitely

61. 25:43

    allowing to have like a way better architecture and allowing to actually have the censorship resistant property have the kind of availability and accessibility and then build on top different clients that are actually like linked into the same identity kind of that's shared all the data yeah and and it's trustless you don't have to trust Mark Zuckerberg to say hey I'm going to do this you don't have to trust anybody you just trust the actual math or the

62. 26:07

    code and that's it yeah so I guess like where do you see we're going from here like when when uh I mean we have one billion user goals so uh but you know um I think the interesting question is like when when do we see like interesting applications that gaining traction with non-ve3 communities right so I think that we need to do a lot of work around wallets and identity and I think that what you all have done with the near wallet that I've seen not too long ago is is exactly in the right

63. 26:39

    direction people need to be able to permissionlessly create wallets without actually going through all of the ux that they currently have to deal with around private keys and there's a lot of ways that people are trying to accomplish this but my brother or my mom or my wife or something like that for me to tell them to go try this app out they don't need to go and do like 30 hours of research around private keys and identity like security and like hacking

64. 27:06

    and all they should be able to click a button and start using the app so once we get there I think that we're in starting to become in the right direction we already have applications and protocols that are implementing gasless and signless transactions near is already kind of doing this this sort of thing lens is doing that so once we get beyond the actual you know issues with identity and ux we already have the applications that are really really high quality on on lens and other social

65. 27:35

    networks are already actually there web3 social so once we get the identity part there I think we're going to be heading the right direction I think also the Big Challenge up until recently with scale so if you actually put an entire social network on on the blockchain it's not going to work because if you look at how much transactions or how many transactions in my opinion at least um the what what basically Twitter is

66. 27:59

    doing is 50 000 transactions per second at Peak you have to find some way to deal with that scale and there isn't a blockchain that exists today that can handle that um in my opinion maybe I mean maybe theoretically but we've never seen it in practice that's right so um so what do you have to do you have to find innovative solutions for that so I think with all the new uh data availability Solutions you have things

67. 28:25

    like bundler Network on rweave which is what we're using but you also have stuff like uh Celestia is and and polygon Avail that can be used as kind of like data availability and also I think with arbitrary Nova did it's kind of interesting um to where you can kind of achieve like the high throughput at the very low cost while the we're keeping the the characteristics of citrusive resistance

68. 28:49

    immutability and permanence then that's kind of what you need and you need to kind of combine those things together and we're just now starting to see that happen so like I think we can handle 35 or 38 000 or so transactions per second already and that's going to continue getting better and I think that that's the type of skill that you need to kind of have to to make this real world yeah for sure and that's I mean we started near with that exact point that like we need to figure out how to provide data

69. 29:15

    availability and execution that can scale 2 billion users and actually like over time continue increasing capacity not just become like uh choke point by whatever the users are doing and so I totally agree that like that kind of as you know those Technologies mature we'll also see the kind of like usability in general becoming more accessible because like at the end actually the the current capacity problems is a usability problem

70. 29:46

    like it ends up you know like if it costs ten dollars right to do something that's a usability problem at the end so yeah totally agree yep so in general I think the the way it's kind of treating blockchains is is infrastructure like we treat AWS and Google cloud and um all these other database software as a service the user doesn't know anything about that it's just an underlying thing and they're not

71. 30:10

    interacting with it right like there's an API that's doing all that work and they're just talking to the app and I think that's the general architecture that we need to be moving towards also yeah I think I mean the the kind of the way we frame it is like there's a whole open web stack right that happens on top where blockchain is kind of Kernel of it but and you build all the other layers that provide gasless transactions that provide data availability that provide

72. 30:35

    kind of um data access indexing all of those apis on top in the way that still maintains the same Pro kind of values and properties of the blockchain right that it's censorship resistant or at least or like from a data availability perspective and it's you know low to zero switching cost like if one of the servers or API servers goes down you can switch to a new one and it gives you exactly the same apis and you don't need

73. 31:00

    to rebuild the full stack on top of it so I think that kind of concept is really important because although there's a lot of applications web3 who use blockchain but then the stack they built on top actually does not satisfy these properties right right you cannot actually run like openc yourself like if openc front end goes down yes yeah but like the rest of the stack is not and you can exactly yeah that's a good point replicate it right so I think

74. 31:25

    that's really important like hey it's not just the blockchain the Webster your Open Lab stack is actually like all of those pieces coming together and kind of providing you um the full solution and and but leveraging this you know Common identity kind of common problem that's a good way to frame it yeah I I think we are pretty much at time so thanks a lot and uh hopefully this was helpful and you guys all build are using

75. 31:50

    your near and land social to really bring this kind of Open Lab to life thank you