We made decentralized money, so we ask ourselves : why not make decentralized finance ? And why not decentralized science ? And why the hell not decentralized social ?
There is only one issue : social is already fairly decentralized.
Decentralized social didn't need blockchain innovation to exist: it was the first internet use-case. We're trying to fix something that’s been fixed since day one.
You could argue that deplatforming is a real issue. And you're right.
Yet, people didn't wait for crypto to fix it - and they are actually are more successful than us.
Mastodon, TRUTH Social, Nostr are real decentralized social, from people that care about it. Even X with Musk is now pretty open to contrarian opinions.
I've been on Web3 social since the launch of pretty much every platform - and I've yet to see someone having an opinion that would make him banned on X. Even if we should effectively ban VC memecoins thesis :)
Truth is, we actually don't give a shit about decentralization.
Soooo, where are we going from there ?
There are three possible evolutions that fit the current Web3 Ethos: financialized social, composable social or extendable social.
Financialized social is closer to what Friend.tech is - with built-in fan tokens & posts that can be bought.
I guess we have all saw the limitations of this by looking at their DAUs. It does not scale past 1000 users.
Financializing stuff is like taking 5 pills of Adderall with 5 coffees and 20mg of Zyn.
You will be fucking great for a few hours, but man, it's going to be bad after that.
Composable social is building a public social graph to populate apps. Problem is, it ultimately needs traction. It works for current crypto users - but gets limited by adoption (but this could be fixed with zkTLS).
And you are in competition with existing social graphs, like X (used by Fantasy Top), Facebook, Telegram or even Spotify - with 100x more users.
Extendable social is built as an API first protocol, enabling people to build their own experiences - similarly to a Web3 protocol.
This design make great use of the strength of Web3 : community building and incentives.
Protocol should be focused on making developer experience perfect, giving people world-building tools.
The protocol should also be agnostic, not trying to favor some teams or users.
There is a very thin gap between : "I want to build on top of this" and "I feel like I’m a free worker pumping their protocol valuation".
Financialization can be used as a tool for bootstrapping, but should be approached cautiously and should be expelled from culture.
Florence culture in the 15th century were built with generous patronage, yet culture wasn’t about making quick bucks. And if you want an up-to-date analogy, study Milady.
Eventually, this protocol becomes the super-app we have all been dreaming about.
We're not talking about early Facebook. We're not talking about early Twitter.
We're talking about a paradigm shift.
My opinion is content should become fluid, Twitter was built on short text. Instagram on fun images. TikTok on small videos. The future of social will probably be a blend of all of this - or maybe a new format.
Finally, revenue should come from advertising : it’s been the best business model for socials for a while - and can be 10x more effective with crypto rails.
There you go, this is my humble opinion on the future of social medias, from someone who published a few frames, built a meme protocol on Farcaster and is a fucking maniac about image based content :)
And this post is taking part in the t2 x Kiwi Writing Contest, which is a really cool way to make people write about ideas they have - thanks to them !