In today's world, current social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are becoming increasingly controversial for a number of reasons, such as content censorship, intrusive data tracking and disinformation.
Decentralized social media such as Lens Protocol seeks to solve the main problems in existing social media networks, which will be discussed in this article. Feel free to read🔰
What is Lens Protocol ? 🌿
Genesis of the Project 🌠
Key Functions 🔑
Current Issues and Building at Lens 🚩
The best apps developed on Lens Protocol 💬
Summary and Usability of Social Media 🔰
1. What is Lens Protocol ? 🌿
The Lens Protocol is a Web3 social graph on the Polygon Proof-of-Stake blockchain. It is designed to empower creators to own the links between themselves and their community, forming a fully composable, user-owned Social Graph.
The protocol is built from the ground up with modularity in mind, allowing new features and fixes to be added while ensuring immutable user-owned content and social relationships.
- What is Social Graph? 🌟
In the context of blockchain, graph is an indexing protocol. Indexing reduces the time it takes to find specific information. Without the use of graphs, we have to search every stored block in the blockchain to find the information we are looking for.
A Social Graph creates all of the social relationships between accounts, helping with order and structure in the world of social media.
Why is DeSo (decentralized social) important? Decentralization means the users have the complete right to their content.This means that instead of centralised entities owning the content, ownership is distributed to the users. And proof of this can be found on the blockchain in this case through NFT’s.
Lens Protocol is fully open source for the community to build on. There are an infinite number of possibilities of tooling and front ends that can be built on the protocol. Social apps, content moderation tools, analytics platforms, verification systems.
2. Genesis of the Project 🌠
Lens Protocol was created by the team behind Aave, led by Aave’s founder Stani Kulechov the biggest DeFi automated market maker with over $6 billion in TVL ( total value locked ) .It was announced in February 2022 and released three months later.
- Origin of the word Lens
Lens Culinaris 🌿 is a tall, branched plant with pods of lens-shaped, small lentils. It has a symbiotic relationship with certain soil bacteria. If the roots are left in the ground, they will provide a source of nitrogen for its neighbor.
- Creating on the Polygon network
Earth first. Polygon's eco-friendly blockchain allows each publication on Lens Protocol to have a low carbon footprint while being on a low-cost, secure blockchain.
3. Key Functions 🔑
Key features of the protocol. It has features of well-known social media systems, such as profile ownership, commenting, re-sharing a post and more - but at its core, the Lens protocol is native to Web3, so any social media platform built on the protocol will be internally different.
Users will own everything, as they are powered by NFT’s. Here's a quick overview of the key features of the Lens Protocol :
- 👤 Profile NFTs – This is the main primitive of the Lens Protocol Composable, non-custodial, and permissionless, these dynamic NFTs contain the history of all posts, mirrors, comments, and other content you generate. Individual addresses can own profile NFTs, an address can contain multiple profile NFTs, and a profile NFT can even be owned and operated by a DAO through a multisig wallet
Important thing is Lens Protocol is that it prevents namespace squatters. Profiles can only be created by addresses that have been whitelisted by governance.
So how can we get our name on Lens?
The only chance now to get our name on the Lens is to be on the whitelist by joining their Discord and following their Twitter where they share information about it.
- 👥 Follow NFT – When you follow someone, you’re granted a follow NFT. Each of these NFT’s has a unique token ID that comes with innate rarity & utility. These unique traits can be used to limit voting to your most loyal fans in governance snapshots. They can even be traded on an open market.
Following on the Lens Protocol differs from following in Web2 social applications. When users follow a profile on the Lens Protocol, they are given a Follow NFT, which creators and communities can encode with additional value. 🌿
- 📝 Publication – Pictures, music, videos, a great poetic work of art – whatever masterpiece you want to create and share, you can with a publication. Lens Protocol supports IPFS and any media type that inspires you.
All the publications on Lens are what make it so thriving. These are all original content, comments and mirrors created by the creators. Publications are posted directly to the user's NFT profile and guarantee that all user-created content remains the property of the user and is in the user's portfolio.
- 💚 Collect - Like what you see? You can collect publications from people you follow. A new form of self-expression, curate your collection, and show off what you love. This collect feature enables anyone to collect your content based on the price, edition size, and time limit you set.
Collects allow creators to monetize their content by wrapping content behind a paywall unlocked by purchasing an NFT. 💸
- 🔄 Mirror – Some things are too good to keep to yourself. Re-share a post using the mirror feature! By amplifying content, you can earn a cut from anyone who collects the original content through your share.
Mirrors are the curation tool of the Lens Protocol which are the equivalent to reposting content.🌿
4. Current Issues and Building at Lens 🚩
In current social networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, accounts are not linked, which means that when you create a new account you start building all over again, without any followers, content or even a profile picture. This makes the process of joining a new social network difficult starting from the beginning.
In addition, all the companies behind these social media platforms have full control over what we do and can censor our content or use it in any way they want. Of course, they are able to sell our data and create our profile used for advertising and product placement.
Today's social media makes products out of users by mining their data and selling them advertising. Lens, on the other hand, works in a completely different way that solves many problems currently facing social media.
Whenever someone wants to build a new social network, they can directly integrate it with Lens, so that anyone who already has a Lens profile can easily be onboarded to the new platform with all their content and followers.
The most important thing is that Lens does not profit from user data, but instead gives users the opportunity to monetize their content and earn money by collecting articles they have found valuable or view as a form of support.
Lens gives us great opportunities for those who want to create content and be in social media. In every way they show us that what matters to them is the community, and the content created on it.
5. The best apps developed on Lens Protocol 💬
Lens Protocol is developing very fast, it is favored by rapid adaptation through social media and with this interesting projects based on Lens are being created.
Below I present the best and most frequently used applications available to users, and a full list of applications that there are many more you can find here lens.xyz/apps
6. Summary and Usability of Social Media 🔰
Social media has changed the way the world communicates, providing an elaborate system for sharing information. In the future, today's largest social media outlets, such as Twitter and Facebook, will face many of the challenges that web3 offers to users.
Blockchain can save social media and provide content transparency, traceability, tamper-resistance and security. The Lens Protocol is currently the largest and thriving social media in the cryptocurrency world, and offers a great path for new projects that want to grow with Lens.
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