Constructing a social media platform from scratch is a frightening process. First, it’s essential set up a social graph which is a map of the relationships between folks. A social graph consists of nodes (people or organizations) and the sides (relationships) that join them.
To create a social graph, it’s essential have a solution to monitor these relationships between folks. That is often accomplished with some kind of information construction, like a graph database.
There are a number of alternative ways to create a social graph. A method is to make use of a centralized service, like Fb or LinkedIn. With a centralized service, the entire information is saved in a single place and managed by that firm. This has the advantage of being straightforward to make use of, however it comes with a number of downsides. First, the corporate that controls the central service can censor content material or delete accounts at will.
Second, these centralized companies are siloed, that means that the information shouldn’t be accessible to different purposes and addons that may need to combine with the centralized utility. Lastly, these companies are topic to single factors of failure. If the server goes down, the service is unavailable.
At a time when social media platforms decide what data we see and don’t see, it’s extra essential than ever to have a decentralized social graph that can allow the creation of a censorship-resistant Web3-ready social media platform.
Cue Lens Protocol, a web3 social graph constructed on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake blockchain to empower creators advert communities around the globe with the capability to launch social media platforms and profiles they personal.
What’s Lens Protocol?
Lens Protocol is the brainchild of the workforce behind DeFi mainstay Aave led by Aave’s founder Stani Kulechov and CEO Alexander Svanevik. The workforce additionally contains CTO Jan Isakovic, who beforehand labored on 0x’s good contracts, and Product Supervisor Filip Martinka.
Lens is an open-source social graph that permits builders to launch web3-ready social media platforms and profiles. It’s constructed on Polygon’s eco-friendly blockchain and works to permit creators to take possession of their content material wherever they go in a Web3 atmosphere.
Web3 merely refers back to the subsequent technology of the web the place customers are answerable for their information. In a Web3 world, there isn’t any want for intermediaries like social media platforms as a result of customers can work together straight with one another. Lens Protocol is constructed with modularity in thoughts, thereby permitting new options and fixes to be added to it thus making certain that the social graph retains up with the ever-evolving Web3 world.
How does it work?
With web2 social media networks, all of the platforms learn information from a singular centralized database. With such a framework, there isn’t any straightforward solution to port information from one platform to a different. That is the place Lens Protocol comes from.
This open-source and composable social graph can empower creators to personal the hyperlinks between themselves and their neighborhood in addition to the content material they submit on the platform by means of the usage of NFTs.
NFTs are used on the platform to signify consumer profiles. Customers are allowed to create profiles that work together with one another forming a social graph. The information and the relationships between customers are saved on-chain on Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake Layer 2 answer. This makes it attainable to port information from one platform to a different with none central authority.
For example, a profile proprietor can publish a regular piece of content material, a remark which factors again to the profile proprietor or follows different profile house owners by means of Lens Protocol’s whitelisted logic embedded within the NFT’s good contract.
From setting a picture for the profile to the setting of the profile’s “dispatcher,” every little thing concerning the profile will be managed on-chain, thereby giving customers full management over their information.
The platform additionally permits for the event of social media platforms and profiles which can be suitable with Web3 wallets like MetaMask, Gnosis Protected, and Argent. This compatibility makes it attainable for customers to log in to their social media accounts utilizing their Web3 wallets with out having to create a brand new account on each different platform they work together with.
What drawback does it clear up?
The social media panorama is at present managed by a number of centralized platforms. These platforms decide what customers see and don’t see. In addition they have the ability to censor content material they don’t agree with.
This centralized management over social media results in a number of issues. First, it ends in the suppression of dissenting voices. Second, it results in the curation of content material that’s designed to enchantment to the bottom frequent denominator. Third, it offers rise to echo chambers the place folks solely see content material that they agree with.
Lens Protocol is designed to resolve these issues by giving customers the ability to launch their social media platforms and management the web profiles that they carry with them all through a web3 web.
With modularity on the core of the Lens Protocol, not solely is possession assured but additionally the neighborhood can decide the way forward for the platform by constructing and creating new revolutionary options that may be built-in into the social graph.
This manner, Lens Protocol can create an ecosystem of social media platforms which can be decentralized, open, and truthful.
The way forward for web3 social media
From the bottom up, Lens Protocol is designed to be a community-owners and ever-evolving social graph. The protocol is open-source, and anybody can contribute to its improvement.
The long-term imaginative and prescient for the workforce behind the venture is to create a social media ecosystem that’s composed of many small, unbiased platforms which can be all related by means of the Lens Protocol.
For the time being, Lens Protocol is working a marketing campaign that’s providing $250,000 in grants to builders to construct new apps on Lens. already, there are some potential concepts starting from apps and video games resembling Phaver (a social cell app with Lens assist), Iris (a token-gated content material app ), and Clinto, which is a content material personalization app.
