Entering the Era of Web3 Social

Transcript

right so in this talk entering the era of web free social we're going to explore the question what would happen if we actually own our presence in social media an interesting thing about this panel is that it's actually well panel presentation is that it's actually going to be on zoom so you can imagine it's pandemic all over again um and so i would like to invite stanley kulechov who's going to meet you on the other side um side of the screen he's um he's um from ava as well as lens protocol projects so enjoy

hey everyone how's it going in barcelona i really really wish i was there and and getting some more time into my uh face as well um i've been waiting for quite long actually this event to happen so i'm super excited to uh be here and present as well uh something interesting about uh the web3 social so i'm gonna uh share um my presentation with with every one of you there and today we kind of like i will talk a bit uh about uh what led us here to grow uh into webtree social um and and also kind of like what kind of uh

uh benefits and implications it has into the social media space and also for us as as creators uh and the users of uh social media uh today um and and also look into the lens protocol how it actually works and what it means for for the builders uh the users uh of the applications that are built uh on top of the lens uh protocol so essentially uh uh this is an interesting statement about uh web 2 social media so obviously website social media works in in in many ways it the internet itself works you know so uh the same way as finance works to some

extent as well so these technologies basically have brought us all together here so um that's the evolution of internet uh with internet we all can come together uh like each other stories post content uh transact and move funds across the globe but at the same time the way we build the internet it definitely has some particular challenges at the moment especially as we become more global citizens and more demanding of what actually the infrastructure could be and in veterinary social uh currently we have different kinds of ways of where we are a bit of limited in the utility

so first of all uh whenever we use uh websocial we are usually using so-called platforms so we're going into one particular platform and we're locking ourselves into that platform into the algorithms and also the interactions the users we're um interacting with or the followers we're gaining are locked in that particular uh platform so we're basically relying quite a lot on on what that platform is doing and also we're providing a lot of the value into those platforms and that can be for example today twitter facebook uh tech token any social media that is built in a traditional internet

sense and of course the the user data is quite heavily uh decentralized at the same time meaning that the the access to that database and all that interactioning um and all that information is is exclusively first of all uh the right of the the platform owners and and they're kind of like that right of actually choose what to do with that data uh many of the platforms actually sell sell the data with the users knowing it in the fine print but you can't ac much actually do because uh all your friends are using the same social media platform and it's very difficult to kind of like make your

digital exit and vote with your feed um when when there's just few providers out there and and and basically you have accumulated your follower base there so for us the the evolution how we came here and where we're going towards definitely started with more of a web one social where we had an internet where you can post content and you know you can read the content you can host your own uh providers uh email is a good example of that um and have distilled this connectivity and of course before social we have media you know there's sort of uh publishing and centralized newspapers

and and before that also uh the book reading writes and and and so forth so kind of like media became more social and where we're today with the uh the social we basically made it more easier to uh publish content share that content with your uh your peers and audience by essentially creating this level of centralization where we have servers and we're interacting with those servers and making it way more easier for us uh to explore content and find content so centralization in one way has brought a lot of people together and at the same time made uh the internet more uh efficient

and the problems that we basically uh in the previous slide went through is something that the web tree uh social is trying to solve so that three and and and the blockchain is quite a lot about uh the idea of uh ownership so essentially uh what if actually you could have ownership on whatever value you might have or whatever things you're contributing or actually ownership or access to anything uh that is available there so where decentralized finance uh provides the kind of like ownership and accessibility to to protocols that are decentralized and accessible to globally to anyone at

the same time with the same uh uh equal uh opportunity in the same way for example where cryptocurrencies as its own value proposition is bringing the idea of uh having your keys you will have your ownership of your um assets well the same way uh in the three social we're trying to solve the idea of actually you having your keys then you have your ownership of your content and also the accessibility and the uh broadcasting channel with your uh audience and and that's the kind of like idea where uh essentially we want to change the the uh structure of how social media works

today instead of uh building um and empowering the the companies that are running these platforms we switch the model um around where the user is the one that is in the epicenter uh and all these algorithms and and applications are built for the user so the user can actually choose to change the applications that they're using or change the algorithms that is that are basically supporting the users to find content or curate uh or filter content so it it gives the freedom and portability and that's what we are uh solving with the the social

aspect and essentially uh in the bigger picture the the web3 social is bringing the power back to the user so so essentially this means that all these applications um are not anymore like the user isn't anymore relying on these applications instead the applications are now relying on the users because essentially if you're not building as a application builder algorithm builder you're not building something that is very beneficial to the user someone else will build that and get that network effect and essentially um for us it's quite uh fascinating how the approach is defaulted so as for

developers um the for example webtree social and what lens protocol is is doing uh it's empowering developers to actually build new social media applications so anyone any part of the world could actually build the next very fascinating social media application uh bringing a new way of interacting with the uh content without actually going for the process of creating this big platform effect building social media today is very hard from developer perspective because essentially you will need to create an application and a network where everyone wants to join and you have that data and you have the content and you have that

uh flow and recently when we looked even a couple of years back how clubhouse was started and how much effort um the the whole clubhouse community was striving towards uh populating the application with content different kinds of topics and rooms and and all that amount of work has to go into to to create to create a social media application or a new way of interacting with content and when you already have that network existing somewhere meaning that you have the accessibility to the user base by just building something new and incredible you can get that user base actually come to your application and that drives innovation and at the same

time every single new application built on the same social graph would also mean that uh it's a new user base and new user acquisition for the rest of the social graph and and also uh to uh those applications so in traditional sense when you look into the current ecosystem social media applications they pretty much build in silos and they're building for their own platform for the for the for those companies to try here the model and approach is different everyone is building towards uh helping each other uh and enriching their uh networks and and and products essentially

and from the creator's perspective essentially because you owned the relationship with your audience it means that as a creator you're not locked into one particular platform and means that if you have some income deriving from a particular platform it's not any more relying towards that so essentially whatever you are doing as a trader you always carry your followers whichever application you choose to distribute your content for your users and and the way you monetize and you have this interesting fascinating area of compressibility as

well where uh since you know you have a open social graph you know anyone can build algorithms you can also build things on top of the applications things that empower creators tools and the platform is open we do have some extent of um compatibility in the traditional social media when you are using apis but there is so limited what you can actually do in terms of terms of conditions and the the the uh endpoints as well and and the kind of like a more inclusive way to build is where you can actually open up the whole system on a smartphone check level on the uh data layer and let anyone to innovate essentially the lens protocol

uh relies quite heavily on tokenization and lens protocol itself is a smart contract based protocol so when you are trading a profile what happens is that that profile isn't nfd essentially you can transfer that nft into another address for example you can delegate different kinds of prides for example if you have posting rights or any other things you want to do and at the same time when you follow another profile uh you actually mean a follow nft and and this means that essentially that following relationship is tokenized as an nfd and the following

follow nfds are dynamic nfds so they will always reflect the latest content that you might have in the social graph so for example if you post a picture of a dog into the social graph what happens is that the following of these will reflect that picture of a dog and when you post something else let's say a picture of a cat those photo nfds will reflect the latest picture of a cat and essentially what will happen here is that as a lens protocol user you actually have a censorship resistant distribution channel for your users and your audience so if i go to let's say into a wallet or into openc i

will always see the latest content by just looking at the following fees and of course uh the nfp logic is is also implemented into the content itself in terms of when you want to actually maintain immutable copy of the content so let's say that i really like the picture of cat i want to mention it so i can actually collect that content and the creator can actually set also fees um for collecting uh and different kinds of uh logic for example only uh maybe one token i follow token ids from one to one hundred convented uh one to ten or they have to have some additional logic that

they might have to have a crypto coven in their wallet to to be able to mint it as well so the protocol itself is very modularized so you can create new modules uh we'll check in a moment but essentially additional logic how it works and of course besides posting you can comment and and mirror and mirror is is essentially the same way as in twitter where you actually are retweeting the content so you're essentially amplifying your content like someone else's content to your audience and the creator can also send mirror fees to to um share with whoever is amplifying uh that content and it's it's actually just an

execute example on how you can actually use nfts in in something like a uh wide as the the lens protocol and essentially why we created the mirror function and the idea of amplification is that the mineral function is just a one example of what you can actually do to empower create the the curators um and curators is is an area in creation where everyone is curating to some extent uh content you might curate something by liking in in let's say twitter or instagram and um or in tiktok and that content will get amplification

but in many of these applications um even if you create let's say a playlist in spotify you aren't actually rewarded as curators so the idea is that uh we want to bring in the protocol uh more elevation for uh curators and and helping to monetize the content application aspect as well because end of the day everyone is a curator one way or another essentially what we're looking to kind of like a achieve here is first and foremost is the the the custody of what belongs to you actually so you as a user are creating all the interactions and

activity in social media um you're generating a lot of data and and uh essentially you should be able to own um the accessibility to that data but also you should be owning the relationship that you create um in social media and that's what's the the idea of bringing the ownership of your social graph to you and of course essentially um compatibility is big part of what we're doing so essentially when you are building a social graph on chain it means that it creates a web 3 footprint and web3 footprint already exists in

web 3 for example when you are interacting with uh d5 protocols like avi or or something else uh you're leaving your web 3 footprint or when you're buying a nft or leaving a battery footprint so you already have this footprint that is existing with the compressibility uh you could actually build new applications where you're using let's say the lens protocol you might use decent class finance and combine them too to build something else and empower the users or it might be just solely related to web3 social where you are building something with the lens protocol and let's say something like live pier

regarding uh streaming content as well and all of the ideas here they basically unleash creativity so when we decrease the barrier of actually enter to innovate as a developer as a creator it means that we see more innovation and we see more creativity there is just thousands ideas out there what you can build in terms of the liberty social uh what you could actually decentralized and and how you can empower creators and curators and users but those ideas never uh realize because um there's just such a big threshold to building to build social

media and get people excited about that and and by lowering that threshold uh down essentially by creating a common social graph uh brings that innovation so ideas that maybe uh used to be very difficult to achieve in the mass scale might be valuable now because maybe the future of social media isn't uh obtaining millions of followers as a creator uh maybe it's finding your niche and and having the right way of an ability to interact the right way with your audience and that could be a viable actually product market idea for social media and you can create smaller

pockets of different kinds of applications in terms of like the protocol itself it's marginalized so there's different kinds of follow modules paid to follow is one example you have different kinds of commenting modules it can be that you have to follow to comment and also collect modules so for example you can collect but you might have to pay fee that might go to a donation or git point or whatever logic you want to set um as a as a create as an application builder um and essentially we have seen a lot of interesting contributions already from the community um in terms of directly

into the protocol and and you could do a lot of interesting stuff you can create more nft gated follows so let's say you have to have besides following someone you have to have let's say a particular nfd or you have to have interaction with a some particular d5 protocol or made a contribution in git coin to follow a particular user or you have to follow some other user to follow uh cue which is kind of interesting thing you can actually do and then you can create even things like um uh trader funding where uh the the followers uh will pay to follow but then the creator will basically share the collection fees with the followers so

this is an interesting area where we've seen a lot of um contributions and of course because this the the protocol lives on on on polygon at the moment you can use everything that exists on the same blockchain or even other blockchains too and oracles and and maybe create additional um modules that have additional logic that actually uh uses something like this in class finance or or something else uh does carbon you have to offset carbon to to to follow someone uh for example so it just shows that the protocol itself is built and meant to be very flexible so that it fits quite widely different use cases and if there's a use

case that you have in mind that you want it to fit we're happy to accumulate that as well and and help you on that and of course we built an api and the idea of the api is that getting data from the blockchain might take some time we basically indexed all the data to get that content quickly it's an api that helps you build a bootstrap application quite fast and the idea is to in the future further time to decentralize it there can be other apis as well being built so it doesn't you don't need to use the lens api you can use the graph or something else but essentially apis uh

the lens api is an example where we could have a system of the middle layers where essentially you can create a interesting content moderation algorithm and feed that through an api across multiple applications or for example who to follow api and offer it as a service to many of this applications that are being built on top of the lens protocol now the uh lens ecosystem is quite drawing i mean obviously there's a discord where people are having fun all the time we had an open letter where we encouraged everyone to come and sign uh for the kind of like evolution of web3

social there's almost 50 000 open letter signers which is nice to see that people care about the web 3 social and we launched into the main metropolia a month ago there's 32 well now there's 36 000 total profiles minted and it's relatively close in the sense that basically it's a lawless basis at the moment but it's growing quite substantially at the moment as we allow list more communities and essentially it becomes permissionless quite soon that anyone can make the profile um it's quite steady in terms of how the profiles has been growing um

since the launch and of course like if you look at the the uh follows as well so you can actually follow anyone and win the polo nfp depending of course on the logic on the lens protocol uh but there's still a low list on the profile creation um yeah and of course one recent development is that we've seen a lot of interesting actually drops on the protocol itself uh so for example recently shify did a drop on on on the um lens protocol through a lancer one of the interfaces um and and essentially uh they raise some funds and we go a bit

further uh on that but just an example what has been built on the lens protocol so we have a a simple basic lens trends application where you can follow and we are using this application to test different kinds of algorithms and all the algorithms will be open source anyone can contribute their own algorithm and we can test it in this application it's going to be very uh fascinating to see like how this open algorithmic ecosystem will grow uh it's very interesting um field to nerds as a data scientist lens there is basically the kind of like a main community built front-end it's very used at the moment it was built in

under two weeks in electro hackathon this just showcases like how quickly you can actually build social media applications um it's quite actually fun i use it all the time um also the person who built lancer yogi his brother built basically uh he goes by the name sassy code stoutlands uh lance protocol so he built lens tube just an another example like how quickly you can actually build a battery social and these are very kind of like basic applications um just so much things to do and and and build further and then we have uh miguel um so he's been um he's quite active in the victory community uh he's there in

um uh eat barcelona probably somewhere in the audience and miguel if you are there but miguel basically builds almost like he built almost like one application uh per uh day so he built the lens uh covered um hacker news that it was more crypto friendly uh he built the uh reflect as well where you could actually post on uh the lens pro calling that will be reflected to your uh crypto twitter audience as well and they're just like examples like how quickly you can build very useful cool applications and there is like over uh 60 plus something contents out there so

there's there some are hackathon projects are more developed there's a lot of interesting stuff coming up if you're interested in building something cool you have to reach me out and we can talk more and and guide you and help you the ideas you can go to ideas that lands of xyz you know we try to kind of like encourage to build something new um regarding to to uh the build in um follower governance letting you know your followers to decide things for you creation is a big topic social verification i'm very bullish because you know twitter has the whole check mark but actually you could have social verification uh communities as well that are uh might do uh better work or more

accurate work on that side but also not only verifying uh necessarily people but you could verify actually content news anything you know you can verify the amount of people even in in this talk so that's that interesting stuff you can build um that's about it i'm kind of out of time um i want to thank everyone who came to the talk and and of course the organizers super excited to see the personal coming along and i hope you all are having fun there and if you have any questions uh feel free to reach me out and talk more or our team and if anyone is wondering it's a blueberry pie and behind of me

so um thank you all and and hope you all have fun there you