Thinking Beyond the Twitter Box: Reimagining Social Networks in the Age of AI and Network States

Transcript

thank you um yeah I guess I can I guess I can start with my um with my first question uh which would be um we have Akasha team and the lens protocol here and we have suji from math Network here um I guess like the first question uh would be when you are doing your Endeavor in terms of revolutionize or uh or funding this new social protocols and platforms uh what's like one limitation you're extremely not happy with the current situation so what's your motivation and uh I guess before doing so maybe like we can have our one um virtually joining and the in-person

joining introduce themselves and their uh projects yeah um yeah we start a mass network back in 2017. uh we got this idea before that but I mean until the Ico bubble we start to realize okay we can use first three to decentralize Social Network um and now it evolve into uh like a quite a huge team with with our ecosystem with our like Grant and we become a middleware try to bridge the Twitter and the other like what's we sing maybe to it maybe lens maybe blue sky and try to be compatible so my extremely unhappy thing is like At first we are pretty lonely

um 2017 to 2020 I remember like 2090 I pitched Vitality to try our rare pocket and it was fun before the Twitter support sending money it was really fun then we have some like nft staff at first I think it's really lonely and then the problem is like um people people don't compatible with each other because you meant you mentioned mess down right um we we donate a little bit to mess down uh for a few years and I talked to Eugene the founder of Master I say oh do you want to try Bitcoin because you can you can raise money there right you can get the public good fund and you like uh I don't want to destroy our planet

because he he's like super against pow and he still don't know he's his POS so I'm probably gonna pitch again and then um I talked to Blue Sky at that time blues I was still part of Twitter before the Elon scene I was lead by um Jay Jay she's part of the cash team so she understands blockchain pretty well and I was like ah maybe you guys can support ens and I think I think she she know the technology but she don't really want support uh blockchain because she thinks the limitation actually gonna stop the mass adoption um on the other side uh you know like um we are running a lot of math Sciences

we're learning the second largest it's from Japan the third largest from Japan the fifth largest from Europe um and we try to say maybe everyone can have uh can have like a unique on-chem profile uh can be ens can be lens um the user are like oh you want to do a token uh you become like as evil as Elon Musk so that's really pretty sad that people fail to see the connection like all all the five six protocol you mentioned um the team I believe they talk to each other but I think the user they don't touch each other and they fail to to to to fit this in a bigger mission to

revolutionize the Twitter or Facebook and the defining kind of internally I didn't assessing and and and and there's like fundamental there's some fundamental ideology I think this kind of incompatible right now so this this is my assessing and I think we are trying to a little bit stop the robin but I don't have like solution yet so that's that's my my thinking yeah awesome let's hand them out to the Akasha team and study hello everyone just checking can you hear us so good yeah so we can hear you Hey so uh some of the the story that has been shared we're also around this space

for quite some time and uh let's say uh the earliest versions of Akasha were developed around 2015 uh you know metal and all the electron you know it was a nice MVP kind of just trying to see if we could work something uh fully decentralized and in 2016 on May 3rd so yesterday uh seven years ago we announced for the first time Akasha and on the WordPress Freedom day and this idea of freedom of expression uh started you know and it's a value that's deeply rooted in our hearts uh although since the beginning we also realized that in our approach

you know decentralization is such an often thrown around word but often misunderstood or you know it's like you say the word to 10 people and 10 people have like different ideas on what it actually means so the freedom of expression in this sense also as we experimented through all these years we started to understand it also from the perspective of the collective freedom of expression and from the early stages in which we have tried to make one decentralized social network we kind of reach the conclusion of weight if it's just one is it still decentralized and also in our earliest versions We started as a fully on chain you know back in the

test net days of ethereum thinking that it's okay at some point this scaling thing is going to be solved you know by the time I was like a year or two away uh seven years ago but you know it's uh obviously a hard challenge to tackle and in the meantime we've also been pushed by this technical limitation to try to see what is the most meaningful and important cryptographic properties that we want to keep uh in the design of the system uh while reducing or eliminating as much as possible the on-chain footprint and the cost associated with the interactions you know in the earliest versions uh pretty much everything would be a non-chain

transaction which obviously is not the the best idea Looking Back Now um and uh since then you know Akasha as a project has underwent its own Evolution uh alongside ethereum and this whole space and uh most recently we have shifted our attention from just trying to build one uh decentralized social network to actually building the toolkit so to say with which uh more people and more communities can build their own social platform so uh you know you have done analogy with the Lego or this composibility that you have a parallel in the D5 space so we kind of

envisioned the future of social media's uh maybe a mix uh mimicking to some extent what we've witnessed with this composability and the explosion of innovation and all kinds of cool things being born by developers building on top of each other's work but applied to social interactions and speaking of icos and tokens oh man back in the day the one of the most frequently asked questions like when Ico and uh in our so to say uh defense we did had this placeholder token that we called aadh because you know it was on the test net anyway and we've treated the economic

layer as a module in itself based on the respect I've gained from witnessing the crypto economic challenge that you have to solve when you introduce a token in the system it's a it's a very hard thing to do and there are so many ways in which a system like this can backfire and you know humans are very creative especially when you have like this pot of uh money in the in the middle so since then we have uh stick to this idea of not introducing a token in the system so I think to some extent this might be actually a really cool things for communities because this leaves open for every community that we choose to use

Akasha to build their own uh social platform to introduce their own perception of value and you know some forms of value can have these units of accounting you know like tokens that have a unit you know the more tokens you have the richer you are but there are also other forms of quantifying value in a community it can be a time bank or it can be all sorts of other ways like Universal basic incons I don't know there are so many uh paths that could be taken that we've said better to focus on the basic things on like where could we make the most impact and leave this whole layer to the community to explore and build on top of it and like to share my personal world and our personal so to

say motivation how this started right after uh uh we had the you know ethereum uh well back then we it was called crowd sale but in the meantime it kind of shifted through several namings but anyway uh after uh like uh the uh version started to pour out ethereum as the protocol was getting nearer to the launch and so on uh I was getting excited as I suppose other members from the early ethereum team on like okay once this is out what could what would be like the coolest things that we could work on top of ethereum and uh to me like this idea of like uh uh internet freedom of expression and censorship and there is

this also uh a really delicate line when it comes what is moderation and what is censorship has been one of the things that I thought and I think we still believe it's one of the the biggest things that now it's our fingertips and we now have new tools that we can choose to deploy in new ways to dissolve problems that are old as uh you know recorded history so yeah we're excited and uh thank you again for having us here and um yeah I'm gonna pass the mic to Stanley thank you can you see us actually can you just see

the the the the panelists or you can see the audience as well um I don't oh I do see now yeah um yeah and I have to apologize my voice isn't the best um today but um just to give very very brief uh background so I I came into uh the blog blockchain space more from um looking at blockchain from um kind of like a democratization perspective so uh what's kind of like an accessibility it could provide so um my interest has been in finance over the past I'd say almost 10 years um and with the other protocol and all the work we have been doing in Ave has

been regarding to this idea of you know how we can actually increase financial and social participation globally um and provide the same opportunity and access um to financial opportunities whatever uh those might be for example so that's kind of like a perspective that we're coming from and and the problem that we tried to solve uh with Ave and I and I think in in DFI it has been very interesting example where we've been able to create um by using uh blockchain and by using transferring the public Ledger an ecosystem that can increase uh Financial

participation and it's still very small scale uh but it's just an example what is the potential um I would say roughly a year and a half ago I became more interested in solving another problem um which is thinking of like how we are gonna for connections and how we're gonna actually talk about news and also share uh insights and how we're going to interact online in the future um and that's been fascinating because I grew up over the Internet so for me um raise like being born and raised in a smaller Scandinavian country in Finland um with the internet for example and in

my early teen years I was able to access a lot of information and that has been a very exciting but I also see that uh from kind of like uh web 2 perspective um a bit down the line is that web2 social has actually made it easier to interact with peers um you know whether it's Facebook or you know whether it's Twitter or some other social media platform so it made it easier to share news ideas and also broadcast information across globally and share information um so what I'm kind of like trying to think about from the um the free social or decentralized social perspective is that you know how we can actually increase that uh those

opportunities in in Social uh participation um but in a way where we kind of like remove some of the um access keys from the platforms and give them to the users um and and kind of like change the Dynamics in a way where um the online presence that you create as a as a user um it really can't be somehow taken away from you so you have better guarantees that for example the blockchain uh provides from the lens protocol perspective so lens is a a project that has significant amount of uh onto infrastructure and the reason for that is that it provides guarantees for let's say things that are valuable to you in

terms of online presence which is for example profile or the connections you make and connect over time um which is basically your photograph but a lot of the things that you can do for example posting content that can happen actually uh purely on a date of a availability layer or in a traditional sense as we use um social today so something I've personally learned and has been fascinating problem to solve is that where the defy and financial layer has been a lot about how do you ensure the the maximum amount of security for uh Financial transactions in web 3 social it's been interesting to understand that what is the amount of security that you need that you can

still offer uh something for a very big user scale um and I've for the past year I've learned um quite a lot so I'm super happy to be here um and talk about this because this challenge of online presence is is very natural people want to connect um the people connect Beyond online you know in real life but with the online Internet infrastructure we're connecting more we're digesting more information finding more information finding the relevant information online is becoming more harder um and especially with the world of AI things are changing um even even faster so it's definitely like a exciting uh field to solve and

yeah thank you stani um talking about this um your public presence and your um your your social engagement on online um on those online platforms for me uh during the Shanghai lockdown time during the the Hong Kong protest time during the the the the the the Ukraine war time I think my online uh engagement I'm online discourse became especially important uh and I guess the question goes back to uh vitalik I noticed your Twitter posting has decreased uh throughout the time so what's your like biggest uh resentment about Twitter yes I've uh I mean I've reverted so much to the strategy I uh tested in 2021 which

is uh not tweeting every anything except for links to my long-form content um and I think I started doing that like basically because I mean first because I found that like the experience of tweeting is like unhealthy it's uh myself and like it's easy it's uh you know get stuck in and doom loops and like feel that you have to respond to other people and you know like oh all of those things and just get into conversations that are pretty destructive and just uh like it's a medium that would that like it felt to me like it encouraged like grandstanding and not really kind of making actual in-depth Arguments for the things for

the things that I want to test uh to express um and I think uh this year also like the the other thing was um that uh I mean I don't I don't know maybe this was just like a bit of a person a personal Grudge with how Elon handled things but I remember when he like first uh started blocking links to like Mastodon and all the competitors and like that like like that's not even something that like offends you know like one particular political party in the US that's like you know breaking like Bedrock principles of Fair competition right and then you know to try to apologize for that he said um you know hey yeah let's uh actually you know I'm gonna I'll make a poll and uh you know should I stay a

CEO and um you know if if the answer is no I'm not I'm not going to be CEO anymore I'm like I voted right I voted to and like I I like thought and I said that like I thought that was actually a really deeply honorable thing for Elon to do but the problem is that he then disappointed me by pretty much never following up on that um and I don't know like it kind of you know doesn't feel right to go back until she follows up on that either um but but yeah at this at the same time though like I have you know started feel like you know even if I continue to do things on Twitter like it feels less like something that either will be or should be the yeah like the future of uh

you know like online communication in the same way that it was in 2020 and 2021 and so I started exploring you know a lot of the Alternatives and much more depth uh what's what's your uh Discovery so far so I admit like voice guy is the one that I haven't tried yet but I have tried I mean forecaster and Mastodon and uh um a lens are probably the biggest three that I have um tested uh recently um I think one of the things that I noticed is that like especially in the early stages like you're not if you're making a social media platform you're not selling an interface you're not even selling like you know a technical

property is like decentralization you're not even um you know selling particular algorithms what you're selling most of all is a community right and like who gets on there first and uh I mean look what kind of culture there is at the beginning ends up shaping a lot and like I noticed the Deep differences in the in the cultures of the two right like from a technical perspective like to me the product of the products look identical like I know Master Point Mastodon Master coin you know there's different servers and you can talk today like you can talk

between people on different servers but like I always felt like that was not very well executed and like it's made just like a complicated UI and I didn't really know how to how to navigate it well but like I like I just basically interpreted both as like a field where like on your timeline and you can like and read sweet stuff right and like from that standpoint they kind of looked similar the cultural differences that I noticed were like like forecaster was like very polite and one of the things that I came to like Wonder is whether or not farcast or I guess actually too polite in the sense that like like what Twitter fundamentally is is it

is it's an MMORPG right it's a massively multiplayer online role-playing game it's uh you know it has millions of players it's a game you know there's the concept of progression you know your follower account goes up you see you know your like you know instead of your like damage and hit points going up it's like your likes to read to keep going up and uh you know people play the game because it's fun and uh one of the fun things about Twitter is like the PVP aspect right and like you know you can uh like attack exactly like you know like it feels good to like watch um you know autism Capital when they like actually go after the bad guys right like uh like watching them like watching them turn against SPF like that was glorious you know and uh you know like participating can be fun um you know

getting attacked like is uh not fun but you're kind of worn so I'm you know accepted as part of the game and like that's obviously yeah you know very misaligned with the Asia experience that a lot of people wants to have and that's also very he misaligned with like what's good for discussion but it's like a real thing and like I came to you know realize that like you can't like you can't leave that urge completely unsatisfied and I don't know like I I don't have like conclusions from this um it's like just one of those things where like you know like often you just you realize that like there's you know

it's one of those Yin yangs where there was like a bad thing deep embedded like right in the middle of the good thing and there's like a good thing embedded right in the middle I think that was a bad thing and like yeah it's uh you realize that it's complicated uh but still like I am and in general forecaster gets uh it's an it's a nice Community it's um you know it is it is high quality um the other thing that I noticed is like the levels of uh like I'm used to a high level of Engagement and like I noticed missing that high level of Engagement in fun faster yeah but that's just because like the crowd is smaller right yeah so that was like that was also one of those just like things I noticed that like hey you know this is a problem they have to

solve unmastered on I felt like there's aspects of the culture that kind of rub the wrong way with me personally like it just sometimes feels like you know this kind of like a little bit too like self-righteous people who understands you know who are the people who are you know what and who is responsible for what's wrong with the world and like you know if you're one of those here that you're you know you're a bad guy and this kind of like deep you know concern Vibe where we're supposed to agree what we're concerned about and uh I I don't know that like that it just it's on like some intuitive level that felt like something that was like more unappealing to me um but and then with a lens I thought

hmm I'm trying this I'm trying to think like I mean I admit to using it less than both both of both of the other two um I think how did I yeah I mean you know you can post and you get a lot of responses I think it was like maybe the closest thing I have to a criticism is like so far it felt not different enough from Twitter um which is like both good and bad um but I don't know like I either says like a little information and I like I admit I need to you know I go back and try more right um and then Noster only like tried setting up an accountant like I don't really approve of the whole thing where you have to like put your private key in the interface like but and then I don't know I look forward to

trying blue sky as well so that's like my perspectives of those just like from a user sort of like do I enjoy it in the way that it'll make me keep coming back sort of uh sort of perspective um I mean from a yeah like philosophical properties of the thing perspective I feel like it's still very early in a lot of ways right like the whole like there's a lot of these philosophical arguments that like why like Federation is fundamentally unstable right I think uh I forget the name it was like some like person named Sarah who identifies as a crypto Anarchist sorry I forget I like who wrote this a very good article that I

yeah like forget the title but it basically made the point that like hey Federation has incentives that are like very centralizing and like we'll see if you know like whether or not that actually happens and then you know with uh far I think with all the others like they're trying to solve this moderation of or this problem of like can we create something other than like the black box moderation algorithm box for solving the problem of like helping people see stuff that they want to see and not stuff that they don't want to see it and like that's a very subjective thing and I yeah like I think all of their Solutions basically kind of eventually boil down to like let's you

know not like or let's not create like a single box that we all fight over let's like try to create choice between you know different algorithms like different recommendation systems like something based on people you follow or something but like that ecosystem hasn't like actually fleshed out enough for me for me to feel like I can actually judge any part of it cool um yeah talking about actually I do want to uh challenge you know all the founders here standings here suggests here Akasha Foundation is here so so we learned the actual Foundation is trying to design this grind framework for the the Next Generation social and uh for lens protocol is if you have a

lens handle then you're basically your social graph are all nfts you I follow suji suji follows me back or become like my Unchained nfts uh that's been you know associated with my ethereum address uh and The Mask network is trying to basically Bridge your web to Identity with your web free identity by you know developing identity protocol to browser extension to mobile clients so I guess my question uh for you know the the three team as well as vitalik himself would be uh what's the one differentiator for your project that can offer to uh the audience like can we can we do something like can we think out of

this Twitter box where we don't be like okay we're going to invent the Next Generation Twitter buy copying creators model and Sparkle a little bit blockchain Magic on top of it what's your like one key differentiator and for metallic if you do design uh a network what will be the one thing you want to promote or you want to change so I guess we can start from suji I mean like when I when I started this like idea [Music] I I think I don't I I recognize myself uh more like an engineer back in 2021 but after 2021 I think I try to be more diverse have more solid experiments so I was thinking about the the real way

actually the railway and the the flight you know the the commercial flight so at first it is very very owned by private company right like uh Andrew Carnegie and I used to live Chicago so you see like all these street names student names are are named by the railway Titans and I think I think then the interesting happened is like um through many different law and different legal pressure like um people Revolution the kind of revolutionizing industry you know it's it's getting a little bit worse but it kind of like kill or the typhoon and and eventually these kind of systems are become more public in France and it's a it's a good case an essentially is a

good case in Japan I also live in Tokyo for a very long time that that if at first it's probably on then become nationalized and then it becomes privatized again and and and and and the the railway station is losing money right if you if you walk into a railway station Jr is losing money but it contributes to the GDP like the city of the GDP of Tokyo a lot like one railway station one uh subway station can contribute to like even one percent of the whole Tokyo GDP because the traffic were there and they start to invest in the real estate around this thing and start to build hotels in I don't know I started thinking about like maybe social

networks should never make money should never um make money and the token itself will be should be used if we do have a token and you know land setting probably will have to I think eventually it should be used as like a community-owned venture vehicle so this is my opinion I think social network should never owe money and and I never make money itself and to look at look at tencent um half of the revenue is from investment and look at like Facebook half of the girls is from acquisition so I think maybe um social networks like the the railway station and like the airport it should be constantly losing money but it should be able to thrive the surroundings and

the surroundings should have like a feedback system able to to make it running so that way I was thinking maybe we should just help users steal back their data from Twitter and just don't tell them not to move to I mean I definitely they should move to another Wall Street social network before they move they should try our solution to steal back their data and somehow make the social network losing money and eventually we help build the surrounding them feedback the the infra and that that kind of like was the Japan Railway story that it become privatized become nationalized and private again but I think in Social Network we're probably going to see this in 10 to 20 years in

the real way it took 100 years so that's my my feeling right now and and so let's tell the key difference that we probably are the only team that try to tell people how to steal back the data from Twitter um the rest of team are like oh we have a Wonderland people come and we're like oh yeah sure you come to Wonderland ABC but I'll just tell you like you can do this to hurt a little bit of elong and you know even back to the Jack time we we tell people how to steal back the data through our extension somehow and we don't own them we'll just go back to the users that's that's my feeling I still I'm still thinking about it but like it always reminds me of the of the huge railway station I saw and I said

like you know that's probably the future of social network because it's like a forum it's a publishing phrase like people you know come and go yeah that's that's my feeling about you without again so like it's I think uh one of my beliefs on this is that it's going to be very hard to beat Twitter by making a Twitter that is just like slightly better like Twitter itself did not be a try to be a better Facebook it invented a totally new category of activity right like Facebook itself you know it did not try to be a better Myspace and if it's a new category of activity like uh if you look at the things that actually like people are saying actually might be taking like Market attention share away from Twitter

it's like well Tick Tock like it invented a new category of activities right and so I think like if we wants to make something better like we have to invent a new category of activity and I mean okay one pos possible answer to this is like seriously we've invented the new category of activity already right and like literally like basically literally a.m you know think about the question of like maybe what we are what we actually want is uh well if we expand that category a bit more and like let's say include daos right what we actually want is to really create a like social tools that are designed around like this new category of activity of like basically

helping small and medium-sized groups to kind of tightly coordinate across wide ranges of projects right and like that's at least a new thing that's uh you know not being served to the to the same extent already right like there's you know it's like something in between like you know slack and Discord and um you know Twitter and a couple of other things together with uh like in-person infrastructure is one example right like the calendar feature in um you know this is a little website has been like super successful right so look that's just one example but I think uh like one really underexplored path to kind of creating new so the you know the

new social media is to try to like you know like actually figure out like what is the new some new category of activity that it makes sense to create and that and that has natural alignments with the ideals that we care about and kind of like push that as a package instead of like pushing for you know like Twitter plus a small vector okay what about uh steny what do you think no I I did I do believe there is like um I think you're muted Danny oh uh do you hear me now hello yeah a bit but that's really quiet can you can you say something again hello what if yeah what if I yell

okay that's please please keep yelling okay I keep yelling yeah I I do think there's a lot of emphasis on Twitter um for example something that is um interesting is that when we launched uh the lens protocol a year ago uh we didn't really have clients so the design space was a bit more open what people will actually build on top of the protocol um but I think also like most of the crypto Community um is uh fairly speaking in encrypted Twitter so it the algorithms finds that the people that are relevant um and you get this kind of like uh Echo chamber there and crypto Twitter is relatively new thing as well it's been

two years but a lot of the actual uh you know previous discussions um regarding for example ethereum has been um in in Reddit um you know Bitcoin Hulk and I I do believe there's um there's definitely opportunities to build something new I mean Dao governance now a lot of the governance discussions are on on forums um which are uh server hosted but that's that could be a good opportunity there but I also think that uh when we build these protocols we kind of like built from the mindset of uh Twitter as well and the data structures and and whatnot and we we really rate uh the things that has been built so far also um from the perspective that they're

very um infant in in terms of um the lens ecosystem for example we've saw first clients like uh Lancer orb and Butterfly um and they they really were focusing on text-based uh content and two of the clients are now shifting more towards you know how we could actually serve the creators that are discovering uh tree um and discovering things that actually um are useful for creators uh in rep 3 and one of the interesting things that goes pretty well uh with this interest social or let's say like uh partially blockchain based social is the uh monetization aspect because you're able to actually

create uh artifacts that represent social networking so that's profile the follower graph uh distribution of content but at the same time you're able to add monetization there so if you share content you could get monetized uh from there so I think there is like a lot of opportunities there where as the ownership uh goes towards people who are using these networks they're able to actually get the net benefit uh from the network the challenge is actually more on the design space so designing social networks is particularly uh challenging because you have to think about all the way not

just the user experience but how you do the actual growth hacking part so if you think about how many social media uh or social applications there are uh per year and the success of it um there are a lot of applications but there's a lot of also um it's very what I'm saying is that it's very difficult to build a social uh media application that is um Everlasting um we see that uh with be real for example we see the numbers going up um and going quickly um down against and it's very hard to also compete against social networks uh like Twitter where the network effects is driving the traction back to the

platform um and I think where the the big opportunity is that if we actually create a design space where um It's relatively easy to bootstrap audience um and get distribution um and you can build faster experience is you kind of decrease that failure ratio as well so for example if you build a super exciting application um and you know it might fail but your next application is more interesting and it provides a different kind of uh Discovery for example you can you can use the same users that are already in the same network and bootstrap from that audience and second thing I think was

um exciting to to monitor a bit is that when you have a network where you have maybe like 20 different kinds of use cases uh which shared uh user base how the actual monetization happens between those different clients and and also algorithms and services that they might be using and how that could be interestingly uh powerful as well as as a network effect itself so I think it's it's just very early and that's why a lot of the examples are in Twitter because that's where the most of the attention is but as long as we build and keep it make it easier to actually build on web3 social and we reuse existing

successful recipes so for example content Discovery is very hard thing to solve or let's say something like uh Bots or low signal High signal content how do you actually match that with the users that are seeking that kind of a content and being able to leverage existing algorithms into new things that is being built and I think that's where the open computation comes in place because one of unique features that web3 social has is that usually these networks are open to compute for anyone so anyway there's kind of like a demographic access for everyone anyone to come build an algorithm and there is

a slight incentive also to make that algorithm public in the sake of distribution and maybe create a bit more advanced algorithm for monetization perspective and reusing those components into something existing so I think maybe those social networking even in the future might look like a shared user base and in some ways you already see this in ethereum itself so you know ethereum is a big social network and there's a lot of applications and a lot of games that you know um are happening you have a lot of D5 games sort of yield games here nft games um people go and buy and sell so you have like this kind of like a social behavior there um and I think that's something like

where where the kind of like future lies so how quickly you can bootstrap from an existing audience uh and build new things and experiences relatively um uh quickly okay thank you so much Danny and then we can go to the Akasha team can probably hello can you hear us hey hey back in Action um so uh uh I think the question was how do we differentiate uh among other webtoon web3 uh social uh project initiatives if uh I'm not mistaken so to

share from our perspective you know I mentioned in the beginning that our journey started with the full-on chain uh you know uh exploration and along the uh Journey we also uh searched for this way on how we can uh remove the casts for the interactions like people in general you know speaking of Twitter versus other uh you know web3 projects that are in this space people in general are not enthusiastic about you know spending money even if it's a small amount for interacting with each other they are now used with this free interaction uh even if you know in some ways sometimes maybe it's a a good idea to have some friction in the design of

the interactions however if we are talking about mainstream adoption probably this is one of the the the blockers that we somehow need to to figure out so in our case how we uh decided to go about it is to have this off chain first approach but by storing proofs uh in an immutable by default fashion and for this you know we use a combination of ipfs ceramic Network and other available webtree Technologies so it's like reusing and building on top of the work of others as much as possible without trying to reinvent the wheel uh where it you know it's uh not making sense better to focus on building on top

of each other than contributing to each other's work as much as possible strengthening the web 3 ecosystem as a whole because this is such a big challenge that I feel not a single project unfortunately has the solution to this it sounds something that's still a work in progress and such a big challenge that you know I think to some extent we owe it to ourselves and Humanity deserves a better communication system in this day and age considering the tools that we have at our disposal and besides this you know we've integrated decentralized decentralized identifiers pretty much everywhere and verifiable proofs as much as possible as a way to leverage this cryptographic

signatures and the verifiability aspect and besides this you know you have this user-owned data Paradigm by default where you know the control over the data is in the hands of the user as a principal you know I think to some extent this should be a default they're not a feature but sadly we are still at the stage where hey this is a feature you know like I hope one day privacy will be by default something that you don't need to talk like this private where privacy um so uh besides this uh you know there are a bunch of things and as we went through this process and iterated uh we've built I think now we are at the fourth uh generation of uh social uh

networking platforms that we've kind of built and rebuilt from scratch each time kind of understanding the things that we can do better and in the process you know there are some things that sometimes we have uh inherited almost like a hangover from the web to uh world and one of these is for example this idea of you know the like button or the heart or the star sometimes you know the like button as a whole uh was introduced by Facebook and uh as you can guess it was not necessarily taught in the best interest of the the users it was uh uh probably designed as a way to understand better the signals so you know oh you like that oh here's a net for you now

that we know what you like better and uh the fact that it kind of fueled this discovery uh like you know your friend like that was more of a side effect at least in my opinion because ultimately most of the web to social platforms are advertising platforms mainly with the social functionality being more secondary to the core business model uh yeah sadly and besides this you know there's also this uh aspect as we iterated through all these uh versions uh that the moderation you know it's also one of these like super thorny hard to solve challenges and uh

I I don't think anyone has solved it yet but one of the ways in which we thought that maybe we can tackle this is instead of you know thinking about the perfect moderation system which is I think somewhat still a fantasy we can instead focus more on uh thinking about how it can be a modular moderation system so you know for example in a community maybe there are some moderation systems that might be more top-down in other communities maybe you have other ways in which the community itself can do a more uh liquid democracy delegated type systems or completely decentralized uh hopefully one day in which you have some

kind of uh Randomness in the process and uh from a pool of people that are willing to dedicate a few minutes or hours or days from a month you would be presented now and then with hey what's your opinion about this post is it okay according to the code of conduct of this community or is it not and you know this is like again like such a big challenge that the best way we thought of solving it is to provide the options to the community so they can build their own uh moderation systems and we have also uh you know uh started and we are working on providing one but we think of it more as a starting point uh that hopefully

will inspire other communities to come up with their own uh systems of moderation because this is again like such a big challenge to solve and besides this you know there is also another big topic here when it comes to governance and you know bringing decentralization back into the the mix here uh you have multiple ways in which you can kind of place the burden of responsibility from operating a social platform you know is like ideal you know that or I'm not sure ideally but usually when you are faced as a platform operator with a with a request to take down a certain piece of content uh depending on the the jurisdiction

where you operate or you know even if it's a tower you know uh I'm a big fan of the idea and the the principles that are behind the dawa as an idea however in practice uh I say sometimes it's disappointing because uh in in some situations it's basically plutocracy disguised as democracy which is you know the one with the biggest backs has the most say and uh that's not necessarily like I think an upgrade to a democracy or like something that we want to tend towards uh in in the future I mean if we think of something like a social network right and uh in this uh in this along this line of thought you know in the

early days of ethereum I was among the the people that I have spearheaded the legal uh and the business sort of infrastructure behind setting up the ethereum crowd funding and the let's say the legal strategy and the headquarters so you know because we reached a point uh speaking from past experience where developers you know we're starting to end people contributing to ethereum as a project we're starting to ask it's like hey should I be worried if I contributed this project because uh well now things let's say are slightly better than back then now maybe it's a more great but back then it's like you know like cryptocurrency and say hey what about the children and all the you know

actions starting from fear not from from Curiosity and more recently we have looked into a way in which uh we can uh get let's say the best out of both worlds so on one side when you talk about Towers I think many people even the or especially I would say the people that are not necessarily technical at heart resonate with this idea of empowerment and having transparency and this idea of distributed resource management and uh all these things that those do so well as a you know a new type of organization but when it comes to you know blockchain and the code is law uh we have had in the past and we still have some let's

say cases from a legal perspective that are now going to set precedence and uh you know you have like uh towers that are being challenged by SEC and other type of like uh legal jurisdictions and you know among the uh you know blessings or the curses if you do not have any jurisdictions where your Tao is actually operating from you're legally exposed to all the jurisdictions so you know in theory if a member of adao is just a member of adao that member of the tower could be held liable in a number of jurisdictions for the actions that the Tao takes as an organization there are on this note just a brief note there are some laws and

projects in Motion in some uh I think California is one of the states that is trying to bring this idea of non-profit towers and uh to make it as a legally recognized form but you know uh USA so far has not been the best let's say jurisdictions for doing a crypto project because of the you know whole cftc SEC kind of dance around is it a commodity a currency or something else when it comes to cryptocurrency and just to kind of bring this point to to a conclusion uh based on this legal hacking so to say because like social networks they do need to be operated somehow by someone uh led us to this idea that we could uh for example use

Switzerland as uh you know yeah centralization some might say but you know on the other side Switzerland as a country is among the most decentralized countries on this planet so uh you could say that in some way maybe it's the minimum fiber centralization that you could insert in this governance entity so the members participating in the operation and the governance of the platform would be protected from personal liability as part of the organization and the association is basically customized in a way that you know this is actually a really cool thing because usually when you start an association the first question is okay so who's the president and you know it's

like come on man like it can be do something without the King on the hill and you know at first like he's like wait what an association needs a prisoner what do you mean like where's the king and that's also the way in which most uh let's say enforcement agencies and so it's like whose head should we behead here and as part of the the design processing and designing this uh architecture of the legal entity we came up with a way in which we basically uh uh split or let's say the powers that were concentrated and the responsibilities concentrated in one function or actually in three functions that the president the secretary and the

treasurer we split those functions into seven panels that each of them have like uh dedicated responsibility and specialization and in these panels you have like a number that could be again customizable we have like uh uh now a limit of up to nine people but these groups would be let's say maybe in some way a parallel to working group that some of them might have like uh let's say the the projects and grants responsibility others might have the technical responsibility and so on and so forth uh or um and with the mention that this uh structure puts the entire uh let's say power of decision in the hands of the

members uh through a democratic uh process so we can use the ethereum keys and decentralized identifiers as way in which the members of the organization can let's say authenticate and verify that it's me I am a member of this organization and I have this vote without having necessarily a token inserted into the the picture a token can be inserted but it's not necessary to achieve this result and uh I think this is gonna be super exciting and we are kind of looking towards this uh new paradigm that will probably coexist alongside Taos and it's gonna be uh let's say a decentralized autonomous

Association type of entity uh that would be operating a decentralized social platform so in there are some trade-offs of course and you know the purists uh one might say yeah but it's a jurisdiction and it's centralized but on the other side side besides the cars you also have the the the pros that we've talked about a bit here and um yeah uh just lastly because of the the layers and how we've kind of architected these things of course ethereum all the way baby and that's uh in the heart there forever uh but because we've been uh kind of redesigning and like had this opportunity of looking at the foundational layers on top of which we

can build things uh this time and the latest generation of the architecture architecture that we've implemented is also chain agnostic so we imagine this community Centric approach to social platforms and you know in uh near future hopefully we could also Envision something like zuzaru that world we call this communities worlds and within this context the zuzaru as a community could decide on WhatsApp acceptable in these communities what's not acceptable here and have this kind of democratic decentralized way of managing things in a transparent and efficient way without getting you know bogged down onto legalities further down the road and

focusing on like what the community does best you know collaborate and in this uh regard I would just like to say one more thing uh we've been talking a lot about information and you know there's also this pyramid of knowledge or I'm not sure what's the what's the name of of it now it doesn't come to mind but you have this idea that you have like the bottom layer being the data on top of it you have the information on top of it you have the knowledge and you know the peak uh the Pinnacle of this would be wisdom and uh I think uh we are still uh maybe looking at the the wrong things here you know the data availability layers and you know you have like blockchains you have

ipfs and a bunch of other technologies that can provide this uh uh availability of data in general and on on top of this the interfaces that we're building and so on could be seen as the information and the communication systems to reach information is shared among the participants but when it comes to the knowledge generation and how the communities can become Wiser from all this information I think we are still getting started there and maybe that's one of the most exciting things that we can uh uh hopefully bring a contribution towards with this new generation of social platforms yeah absolutely um really really appreciate that uh very amazing talk and uh I do want to do some

interactive stuff with the audience but we do have 20 to 30 minutes towards the end of this entire event so by the time I really would want to invite you all to come and say few things you you do want to suggest to those amazing Builders as a Kasha team is uh going through this uh uh Team Building International Star Wars day so we we want to you know gather attention and tell them you know what what actually the users wants right