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Author: Lorenzo Sicilia, the person in charge of Outlier Ventures; Translation: Bit Chain Vision Xiaozou
Outlier Ventures noticed the healthy development of some decentralized social networks, and Farcaster and Lens Protocol have begun to get real user attention.When it comes to products facing the mass market, the encryption technology is becoming more and more practical and efficient.For a long time, the lack of private key management and mobile priority experience has hindered people’s encryption.
In this article, we will discuss several major encrypted decentralized social media competitors. They have their respective functions and architectures, and talk about the opportunity of web3 founders who are keen to build a new social map agreement.
1, Social network
More than ten years later with Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms, everyone knew the operation of social networks.The concept of social networks is user -centric. Users can provide their preferences to the system by filling in personal information and choosing the accounts they like to follow, while users will get real -time custom information flow.
Around this simple concept, the social network has established its own empire, and its ultimate goal is to attract users’ attention and allow them to stay in the high -wall garden of social networks for a long time.The user’s data contains value, and these data in turn have become products.
Decentralized social networks want to break these barriers, realize the transplantability of user identity, allow users to control their preferences/privacy, and make the switch between platforms easier.
Just as cryptocurrencies can bring any transactions that do not require permission to anywhere in the world, DESO (decentralized social) brings non -licensed communication and irregular broadcasting functions.
However, what really makes people really is that DESO does not need to be licensed for the builders, and allows developers to carry out new development on the basis of existing agreements without requiring innovative permits of any Gatekeeper (goalkeeper).The successful paradigm of “Defi Lego” can be repeated here.
Before the emergence of Web3 -based DESO, the only decentralized social attempt was Mastodon.After the acquisition of Twitter in Elon Musk, Mastodon seemed to be preparing to take advantage of this advantage, but in the end its usability problem and fragmented user experience caused its growth to stop at 1 million days.
Today, Farcaster, Lens, and other projects are trying a different method based on Web3 -based construction, bringing some new things.
2As well asSocialFi
SocialFi adds Web3 primary to decentralized finance above the social map network.Participating subjects include content creators, Internet celebrities and end users. They want to better control their data and freedom of speech, and can make profits through social media attention and stickiness.
The monetization method is based on cryptocurrencies, while identity management is treated by a set of private keys.Most of them say they can use decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to resist censorship.But there is currently no conclusion.
Let’s take a look at the main differences between it and other social networks:
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Token door control area: Only the creator’s tokens can access certain functions or regions.
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Tip: People can receive tips in the form of cryptocurrencies, which can be platform tokens or other tokens.
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One -time subscription or regular subscription: The encryption payment of digital products or services is carried out on the platform.
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Platform incentive: Users and creators can obtain platform token incentives based on their participation.
Although these concepts have been existed for a long time, they did not get high market attention until Feriend Tech discovered the potential of token door control chat.Users need to be called “key” tokens (transactions), which can benefit users from the increasing popularity of content creators.
Friend Tech had 800,000 unique address users during its peak, but then, the retention rate decreased significantly.
Although the Bonding curve is good at promoting the use of urgency and FOMO, in the long run, these curves are lacking in terms of user retention.To truly maintain user stickiness, two key elements are required: as more users join, the network effect that can enlarge the value of the platform is needed; there must be a significant long -term effectiveness that can provide practical benefits that exceeds short -term benefits.
3As well asWeb3Social map
Social maps can represent the relationship between entities, such as people, organizations, locations, and other things that can be linked to each other.Web2 main bodies like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Tiktok have accumulated significant network effects, especially in preventing users from joining other social networking sites because switching the network means coming from scratch.
Lens, Farcaster, and other items have differentiated from this friction point. They have begun to develop a real open map with multiple front -end, using the same data to provide different user experiences.
However, Facebook generates 4PB data every day.510,000 comments per minute, 293,000 updated status, 4 million likes, 136,000 uploaded photos.At present, any existing blockchain cannot process such a large amount of data, and may not be processed forever, because the optimization of the blockchain is aimed at different types of use cases: there is no need to license value exchange.
For example, dual payment is a typical blockchain financial risk. It is unrelated in decentralized social networks that handle user names, content distribution and notifications.The Lens and Farcaster team should consider different assumptions under the balance of pros and cons.
4As well asLensprotocol
The Lens protocol is a combined social map created by the founder and CEO of AAVE.The agreement is driven by the community and is currently deployed on Polygon.
Lens’s construction revolves around several key smart contracts, which handle all aspects of socializing.
InProfilesUse NFT to represent, that is, the main object in the protocol.If you have one of the NFTs, you control your social maps and content.-Profile contains all posts (posts), quotes (quotes), Mirrors (mirror), comments (comments), and all other historical records generated by users.
InPublicationsThere are four types of content on behalf of the agreement: POSTS, Comments, Quotes, and Mirrs.Posts is the basic object, and others are expansion of basic entities.The most important thing is that each Publicization has a Contenturi.Basically, except for content (such as images, text, etc.), all content stays on the chain. These contents are associated with decentralized storage solutions (such as IPFS or Arweave or even AWS S3).
InMirrorAs well asCommentsandQuotesAllow users to interact with Publication through comment, quotation or content.Therefore, all references to the original Publication module follow the same rules (for example, only followers can quote/comments/mirror).
InOpen ActionsProvide developers with a method of constructing a custom function that can directly embed the protocol.You can think of them as a hooks triggered by the protocol (for example, Alice can see that the BOB gives her a tip, so she can have an INDEXER index that tracks income).
From the beginning, the Lens team focused on the agreement itself and let the community be responsible for the front -end construction. Therefore, many different UIs have been created, and each UI has its own style.
The result of this is to form a vibrant ecosystem, and there are also chaotic scenes. Many projects have disappeared within a few days.However, we have gradually seen the integration of some projects, such as Buttrfly, Hey.xyz and ORB have received a certain degree of attention.
After running Lens V1 for a period of time, Lens launched Momoka, an Optimistic L3 that transcends the blockchain space.They did not store the data directly on Polygon, but used the data availability (DA) layer to reduce the cost by uploading the data to Arweave.
5As well asFarcaster
Farcaster is another web3 social network built on Ethereum. It uses smart contracts on the chain and dot -point network matrix based on the “Hub” client.
Similar to Lens, Farcaster is open, and many clients have been born on the basis of it. The most popular one is Warpcast. It is developed by the FarCaster team.Function) and YUP (focus on cross release).
In 2022, Varun Srinivasan published a blog post on “full decentralization”, which put forward some ideas in the article. Since then, these ideas have always been the core of the FarCaster architecture and method.
The main idea is that if “two users can find other obstacles on the network and find each other to communicate with each other” on a social network, then the social network is enough to be decentralized.
To do this, you need:
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获取唯一用户名
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在该用户名下发布消息
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从任何有效名称读取消息
Farcaster通过部署在Optimism上的一组核心智能合约来实现其架构：
InIdregistryCreate a new account to allow users to transfer and restore the FarCaster account.It is also integrated with ENS, and the user name can be obtained by the legal owner.
InStorage registryThe store will be rented to an account.The storage price is priced in the US dollar and converted to ETH with Oracle.The price depends on the supply and demand.
InKey registryPublish the APP key through the account so that they can publish news on behalf of them.
As you can see, the above -mentioned smart contracts do not send or receive messages, and this duty is entrusted to Hubs.Hubs is a distributed network that consists of a Hubble instance. Hubble is a node built using TypeScript and Rust.
Each node is responsible for verification, storage, and replication, and evaluate its peer nodes.
By verifying the valid signature from a user account key, a message level verification is performed.
Once the message is valid, it will be stored in Hub through the asynchronous process of the CRRDT (Copy Copy Data Type) method.
Copy is achieved by using Diff Sync and the Gossip protocol based on the popular Libp2p code library.HUB regularly selects a random node to execute Diff Sync, comparing the news of Merkle Tries to find the missing messages.
HUB has a powerful final consistency architecture, because even if they are off, they can use their peer node reconstruction status.
Equal nodes are important for the state of maintaining protocols, so they evaluate each other.If nodes do not receive effective information, backward or too many GOSSIP, it may be ignored.
6, No need to license
From these agreements and principles, we saw the new primitive.Among them, Farcaster’s Frame has received quite a lot of attention.
It is possible that Frame makes a custom experience injecting FarCaster information flow.It expands the Open Graph standard and converts static images into interactive experience by adding up to 4 buttons.When the user presss the button, according to the button of the button to generate the server to generate the server, they will get a new image.
On this basis, we have begun to see many experiments, such as creating pools, digital collections, and mini -games deployed through these Frame.
Use any application server that can return to HTML content to create Frame, but we have seen a lot of Frame, such as https://framesjs.org/, https://froG.fm/, and other Frames that help developers simplify the process of the processEssence
Frames在Farcaster上成功发布后，Lens现在也在做相关考虑，这表明拥有共同的标准可以成为一个强大的推动力。
7,in conclusion
Before the decentralized social network, it still faces huge challenges before complete success, including expanding its infrastructure to accommodate more users, simplify the process of new users to create digital wallets, and abstract GAS fees as much as possible.
Despite these challenges, we still see that Farcaster has made substantial progress in the overall user experience, and forms a viscous community (for example, about 50,000 daily live users and about 350,000 registered users) around FarCaster.促成这些数字的一个重要因素就是手机app的可用性，要易于安装，用户体验要与传统社交网络相似。
Another key factor is that the agreement (for example, Farcaster, Lens, etc.) does not need to be licensed, which provides developers with fertile soils that are innovative and develop and build on existing blocks and functions.
It’s like the summer of DEFI, we are witnessing a dynamic experimental environment (for example, yup.io is a decentralized social network polymer, as well as Drakula.app, this is a short video platform, or Neynar.com,This is a SaaS tool based on Farcaster), which are based on these protocols.
The founding people can now start a native web3 distribution channel for their projects. People can open their journey through these projects and expand from their initial interest points to directly embedded in their information flow (for example, through Frames).Applications of other applications or other links.At the same time, applications that attract new users can be used as a distribution channel that refer to the rest of the decentralized social network, so that a positive feedback loop is turned on.
