Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web as he thought as an egalitarian tool that would share information for the greater good. But the web has lost its founding principles. Net neutrality is a basic value of the internet according to web inventor Tim Berners-Lee, accusing Facebook and Apple of threatening the web's future development.

Introduction

As of this writing, we’re entering the crypto winter, real innovation tends to happen. Humanity started to find something solid to build.

One most recent emerging trend direction in the crypto space is social. During the DeFi summer, crypto started to make sense when there are many use cases with smart contracts to program how money flows such as swaps, loaning, borrowing, leverage trading, the stake for interest, and providing liquidity. But that does not bring more users when NFT started to step into the spotlight. NFT is a beautiful design standard that ingrained culture, art, purpose, and social use-case, that’s why it makes more people able to relate to it. Organically, social is the keyword here which led to bringing that, social media and the social graph would be the next “big thing” that would disrupt the social media platform. Notably, Web3 Metaverse would need this social layer in order to take off.

This movement can’t be ignored when powerful leaders such as stani.eth and vitalik.eth started to show some signs about the problems in today's social media. Well, nothing speaks louder than action right? stani.eth, who is the founder of Aave, started to led first with creating Lens Protocol, a permissionless, composable, and decentralized social graph that makes building a Web3 social platform easy. Not only that, but he also poured in funding to provide grants for any Web3 startup to build their dApp on top of the protocol.

The movement has begun

Money flows where attention goes. - Steven Aitchison

All the stars started to align in the same direction, many investors have paid attention to this area and many startups have started to raise millions of dollars into their projects. Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit and leading Seven Seven Six, has partnered with Polygon to raise $200 million for social media on Web3. A startup called CyberConnect focuses on “decentralized social graph protocol” raised $10 Million. Notably, POAP, focus on “Proof of Attendance Protocol” raised $10 Million. Another worth mentioning startup, SO-COL, a decentralized alternative to OnlyFans, announced the close of a $1.75 million seed round and many more Web3 social startups are emerging every day. Anyway, the trending is already here.

Web3 Social Ecosystem

The best part of Web3 social is, as a builder, you are not alone when building a Web3 Social Media, we all are involved. The benefit of using the ecosystem is, you could get your dApp started with users and supercharged quirks such as profile identity, getting a number of followers, follow users feature, share (mirroring), posting something in the blockchain, and more. There are many wonderful and reputable protocols that have already laid out the foundation. At this point of this writing, do check out the available social protocol blocks such as social graph, portable digital identity, and attestations.

Social Graph

• Lens Protocol — Web3 social graph that lives in Polygon chain network and works hand-in-hand with NFT infrastructure layer. They provide wonderful APIs in which you can directly bootstrap your dApp without a backend server. This convenience saves both time and costs to head start your social media. Not forget to mention, this protocol is a living organism, meaning that everyone can come in and contribute useful modules to live within it. Hence making it a truly living protocol that keeps on growing.
• CyberConnect Protocol — Web3 social graph that lives in both Ethereum and Solana. This protocol provides powerful indexing results from the social graph such as recommendations and making sense from the complexity of the social graph. Not forget to mention, this protocol provides a social verifier, which conveniently verifies and obtains the protocol users’ Twitter account verification and more social platforms to be supported in the coming future.

Portable Digital Identity

• Disco.xyz — This protocol supports the personal data backpack that you own and travels with you across Web2 and Web3 social media. This is a big deal and important so that users truly own any of their data and decide where their data should be at.

Attestations

• POAP — Nothing beats the fun and putting a smile on everyone's face when receiving POAP. This Proof of Attendance Protocol provides bookmarks for every important moment that you might want in your social media dApp. Three aspects of important offers from POAP are social, memorable, and time-bound.

At this point of writing, these are like the basic blocks for building social media. But in the coming future, definitely, there would be more social protocol blocks probably like analytics, advertising, insurance, censorship on violent & illegal content, and more social aspect to be covered. Do DM me if you have more to cover, which I can add to the list I curated below.

As a Web3 User

This article, won’t be complete without covering the perspective and benefits of being a Web3 user. There are a few benefits I could think of at this point of writing, which covers below.

• Control — Every Web3 user has granular control of how and what kind of data to reside. And with the notion of blockchain, gives the vibe awareness and cautiousness which indirectly educates everyone to be mindful of what data they should put up on the blockchain because it is permanent!
• Rewards — Just as stani.eth mentioned in his tweet above, most of the revenue has been absorbed by large Web2 social media. As a user, you owned your data, organically, the profit should be part of your contribution to the web. Not theirs.
• Innovative Experience — When living in Web3 social, indirectly, you are contributing to the open economy of Web3. What this meant is the contribution in terms of funding will encourage more vendors to build better and innovative dApp in the Web3 space.
• Freedom — This is a huge one, freedom of speech is truly crucial, so your voice would resonate and bring forth impact. Not everyone has this privilege, this happened not only in the third-world country but everywhere, so the time to change is now.

Conclusion

To define the success of Web3 social, I would like to quote from Naval Ravikant as below.

This principle has been shown through the Web3 social movement led by stani.eth, as to how Lens Protocol’s designed to benefits the whole ecosystem, turning the zero-sum game into a collaborative one.

But I do not endorse that Lens Protocol should be the only one social graph to use, a resilience dApp should be versatile enough to adapt and integrate as many social graph providers as widely possible, till we have a solution sort of like a “bridge” to close the gap from social graph to another one.

Not only that, in my opinion, another critical piece for web3 social is the infrastructure that supports blockchain-agnostic and as well openly accessible to be built by developers and other apps in the Metaverse.

In the end, personally, I think Web3 is about everyone coming together and doing things together. Don’t think monopoly would take root in this space. We’re at the dawn of Web3 social, things definitely get more exciting.

See you on Web3 social media soon!

My journey

I’m on my mission to create a protocol in the Web3 social media space as well. Do follow my Twitter @0xSilkRoad (changing to Web3 social soon) and check me out.

Side note, I curate a list of Web3 social media. Do help me out, if I missed out on any Web3 social media on the list, please do submit a PR. Thanks.