Constructing a social media platform from scratch is a frightening process. First, you should set up a social graph which is a map of the relationships between folks. A social graph includes nodes (people or organizations) and the perimeters (relationships) that join them.
To create a social graph, you should have a technique to observe these relationships between folks. That is normally accomplished with some knowledge construction, like a graph database.
There are a couple 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 knowledge is saved in a single place and managed by that firm. This has the advantage of being straightforward to make use of, nevertheless it comes with a couple 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 is just not accessible to different purposes and addons which may need to combine with the centralized software. Lastly, these companies are topic to single factors of failure. If the server goes down, the service is unavailable.
When social media platforms decide what data we see and don’t see, it’s extra necessary 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 all over the world 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 consists of 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 allow creators to take possession of their content material wherever they go in a Web3 atmosphere.
Web3 refers back to the subsequent era of the web the place customers are in charge of their knowledge. In a Web3 world, there isn’t a want for intermediaries like social media platforms as a result of customers can work together instantly with one another.
Lens Protocol is constructed with modularity in thoughts, thereby permitting new options and fixes to be added, thus guaranteeing 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 knowledge from a novel centralized database. There isn’t a straightforward technique to port knowledge from one platform to a different with such a framework. 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 group and the content material they submit on the platform via NFTs.
NFTs are used on the platform to signify consumer profiles. Customers can create profiles that work together with one another forming a social graph. The info and consumer relationships are saved on-chain on Polygon’s Proof-of-Stake Layer 2 resolution. This makes it attainable to port knowledge from one platform to a different with out a government.
As an illustration, a profile proprietor can publish commonplace content material, which factors again to the profile proprietor or follows different profile house owners via 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,” all the things concerning the profile could be managed on-chain, thereby giving customers full management over their knowledge.
The platform additionally permits for growing social media platforms and profiles appropriate with Web3 wallets like MetaMask, Gnosis Secure, and Argent. This compatibility makes it attainable for customers to log in to their social media accounts utilizing their Web3 wallets with out creating a brand new account on each different platform they work together with.
What downside does it remedy?
A couple of centralized platforms at present management the social media panorama. These platforms decide what customers see and don’t see, with the facility to censor content material they disagree 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 curating content material designed to enchantment to the bottom frequent denominator. Third, it offers rise to echo chambers the place folks solely see content material that displays their identical views and opinions.
Lens Protocol is designed to unravel these issues by giving customers the facility to launch their social media platforms and management the net profiles that they carry with them all through a web3 web.
With modularity on the core of the Lens Protocol, possession is assured. The group can even decide the platform’s future by constructing and growing new progressive 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 honest.
The way forward for web3 social media
Lens Protocol is designed to be a community-owners and ever-evolving social graph from the bottom up. The protocol is open-source, and anybody can contribute to its improvement.
The long-term imaginative and prescient for the workforce behind the undertaking is to create a social media ecosystem composed of many small, impartial platforms related via the Lens Protocol.
In the meanwhile, Lens Protocol is operating a marketing campaign providing $250,000 in grants to builders to construct new apps on Lens. Some potential concepts vary from apps and video games reminiscent of Phaver (a social cell app with Lens assist), Iris (a token-gated content material app ), and Clinto, a content material personalization app.
