Original author: Messari - Dustin Teander
Compiled by: BlockTurbo
Traditional social products are often thought of as fully packaged content and communications applications. However, at their core they are primarily identity products. They provide the fundamental connection between a person’s digital persona and their data, content, and social relationships. The connection between people and content is the foundation of digital communication, yet it is monopolized, manipulated and monetized through sugar-coated bullets constructed by a few closed platforms.
Decentralized Social (DeSoc) protocols are re-architecting digital identities so that they are owned and managed by users. With DeSoc, users have the freedom to communicate and build applications with trust, without manipulation or censorship for profit. Before this happens, DeSoc networks need to achieve a minimum level of network scale and overcome the current centralized platform paradigm.
In the traditional social field, many platforms are almost unbeatable in the competition because the rich personal data and content data (social graph) they possess are not available to outsiders. While platforms can make huge profits from it, limiting access to the social graph creates three core problems for creators and related businesses:
Disjointed Creator Monetization – Outside of social media, creators are often forced to use tools like email lists, blogs, and other partnerships in order to fully monetize their content. While the overall creator market will grow from approximately $14 billion in 2021 to over $100 billion in 2022, creator revenue is limited due to increased user friction from having to switch across tools and platforms.
Disproportionate share of platform value – While social platforms earn more than $230 billion in revenue primarily from advertising, content creators only earn about $6.5 billion in revenue share. For example, on YouTube, which has the most generous revenue share, nearly 98% of creators would not reach the U.S. poverty line on ad revenue share alone.
Centralized creator revenue distribution – Because social algorithms optimize for predictable performance, only top creators with predictable traction receive the vast majority of ad revenue. If developers don’t have access to social graph data, there’s no subsequent business model innovation that can support the midriff among creators.
Given the huge income imbalance between platforms and creators, there is a huge incentive in the market to use technology to bridge the gap. With an open social graph that anyone can build, DeSoc in the Web3 era poses a viable threat to existing social platforms, whose competitive moats come from their closed architecture.
DeSoc architecture
The DeSoc protocol, like traditional social protocols, provides the core link between personal account information and digital content. Account profiles are typically NFTs, and published content, whether posts, videos or comments, is tied to a core account on-chain or off-chain. Because all account and content relationships (the social graph) are open and readable by developers, anyone can build front-end applications and features on top of the social graph. This breaks the technology stack of traditional platforms and significantly expands the potential for innovation.
Just like increasing the contact surface area between two chemicals creates faster, richer reactions, increasing the surface area between developers and technology exponentially increases the potential for new applications and capabilities.
As development has increased, many projects have been launched to solve problems outside of the core social graph. They are building every aspect of consumer applications, from developer infrastructure like video transcoding to features like messaging and search.
Although still in the early stages, these projects are largely composable and are therefore quickly becoming viable infrastructure for consumer applications.
Personal accounts and content relationships in the social layer are at the heart of any consumer application today. Typically, this layer of infrastructure benefits from shared standards. However, the core social graph protocols, each with different design criteria and trade-offs, are in the early stages of building user bases and integrations. Therefore, upward investment in front-end and application infrastructure is challenging.
However, advantages can be found in a deep understanding of the design tradeoffs between scalability, developer experience, and decentralization of social graph protocols.
social graph protocol
The four most talked about social graph protocols are Lens, CyberConnect, Farcaster, and DeSo. Each defines its own core framework for creating accounts, following other accounts, and publishing content. These four protocols are at different stages of maturity and have unique designs and trade-offs.
Lens
Protocol design
Lens, currently in a closed release stage, is designed based on smart contracts and built on top of Polygon. Each Lens profile sends a ProfileNFT, and all followers of the profile send a FollowerNFT to represent the connection. In addition to basic personal accounts and subsequent content, other core concepts of Lens are:
Publications – Posts made by a profile are stored in the user’s ProfileNFT, with URIs pointing to metadata stored in off-chain solutions such as IPFS. To save fuel, publications only become NFTs once they have been “collected.”
Collecting – Users can “collect” another user’s post which will be minted as an NFT in their wallet. Collections are a way for creators to monetize their content directly, and for users to build stronger relationships with other profiles. It also introduces a new monetization avenue for people who find and repost valuable content.
Mirrors – Mirrors are reshared publications. Since they are not real publications, they cannot be collected directly. However, if the original content is collected by other users, the person who forwards the valuable content can receive part of the revenue. Additionally, Mirrors creates a new form of advertising technology where users can inspire others to enhance their content.
Modules - Modules are smart contracts that execute when triggered by events such as new followers or favorites. Developers can customize Lens' features within modules and use them to build new features, including monetization. For example, a follow module may require a fee or subscription to follow a profile. Modules drive scale and feature potential because developers have a framework to add nearly any feature to Lens, while the social graph remains standardized and therefore composable.
Built-in governance – FollowNFTs are effective badges that indicate a user is part of a group. Understanding the potential, Lens built additional logic into FollowNFT for things like voting delegation. Users can come together to form a social DAO, which can have its own profile and be managed by its FollowNFT holders. Additionally, DAO owners can program special voting and governance rules directly into FollowNFT.
integrated
The front end mainly interacts with the Lens contract through the Lens API. The Lens team indexes all Lens contracts such as ProfileNFT and FollowNFT. It then stores the formatted data in a Postgres database. Data is accessible through a standardized Lens API, improving performance and speeding up time for front-end developers.
Because Lens is a smart contract built on a general-purpose blockchain, it requires another network to handle high-throughput functions such as content management and messaging. For messaging, Lens recently partnered with message storage and encryption network XMTP. It is used to securely send DMs to other personal accounts in the Lens API.
Application developers determine content storage for images, videos, and general metadata, often choosing IPFS and Arweave. However, controlling content access, and thus scarcity, requires a key management network that encrypts and decrypts content, such as the Lit protocol.
The Lit protocol is used at the developer level to encode rules for accessing content. For example, users can token-gate a post so that only holders of subscribed NFTs or other tokens can view the post. Lens recently embedded token-gated posts using the Lit protocol into the Lens API, making it easier for developers to build content scarcity into their applications.
pros and cons
A core advantage of Lens and other smart contract-based social graph protocols is composability and scalability. Developers are free to implement Lens extensions that interface with any other smart contract protocol. Additionally, other protocols that interact with Lens can be more easily deployed, such as reputation-gated DeFi or DAO tools. The design surface area of smart contract social graphs like Lens is a major advantage compared to traditional social platforms and web-based cryptographic social graphs.
One drawback, however, is the limited and generic recommendation engine in the Lens API (basic content feeds are available today and may be improved). Without strong recommendation capabilities in the API, social feed projects would have to build their own indexers and then build their own recommendation algorithms to recommend new content to users. As front-ends mature and seek to gain a competitive advantage, they will almost certainly explore rolling out their own indexing and recommendation algorithms. Additionally, this trend will extract value from Lens, as front-ends with strong indexing and algorithmic capabilities will have no incentive to pay taxes or write data back to the Lens contract.
Currently, Lens is only deployed on Polygon, which limits Lens’ user base and scalability to the base chain (a drawback of all smart contract systems). However, there is nothing stopping Lens from launching new chains in the future and aggregating social graph data in its indexing process and exposing cross-chain social graphs through its API, similar to what CyberConnect does today.
CyberConnect
Protocol design
CyberConnect is a closed-launch multi-chain social graph protocol that recently gained over 20,000 account profiles. As a smart contract-based social graph, CyberConnect, like Lens, uses NFTs to represent profiles and followers. However, they differ in content representation and API methods.
CyberConnect core capabilities include:
Account NFT – Each personal account profile (ccProfile) is a non-transferable NFT. Once created on one chain, the account name is retained on other chains. Account NFTs serve as the central relationship point for all user content and subscribers. Additionally, this NFT collects any payments from collected content or subscribers.
Subscription NFT – After following a profile, a Subscription NFT is minted to the user’s address, representing the connection between the user and the newly followed profile NFT. Additionally, account owners can set rules, such as requiring ownership of tokens or some small payment before issuing a subscription NFT.
Essence NFT – Account-generated content is represented as Essence NFT, which adheres to the OpenSea metadata standard. They can be any digital object the user desires, such as posts, blogs, videos, or credentials indicating social status. Similar to Lens, other users can collect Essence NFTs for free or for a fee, depending on how developers configure the middleware that manages Essence NFT functionality.
Middleware – Developers can configure rules that are called during events such as publishing an account, subscribing to an NFT, or collecting an EssenceNFT. Similar to Lens Modules, CyberConnect Middleware allows users to customize how they want to monetize their content and create user experiences.
Multichain – CyberConnect is currently deployed on Ethereum, Binance Chain and Polygon where users can create accounts and content. New accounts, subscribers, content and various on-chain activities are indexed across all chains and then aggregated by CyberConnect in its API.
Off-chain data – Data from data storage networks like IPFS and Arweave is indexed and stored alongside other off-chain data sources like Rarible, Twitter, and Foundation. By correlating on-chain and off-chain data, CyberConnect is able to build a comprehensive view of the user.
Interest Graph Engine – CyberConnect aggregates cross-chain index data first into a relational database and then into a graph-based database (Neo4j). From the graph database, CyberConnect exposes data through its API. Additionally, CyberConnect has built a recommendation model that recommends profiles to follow, content feeds, and more. Developers can access these models from the API, significantly reducing initial application development costs.
integrated
The CyberConnect API is the primary tool that allows developers to leverage CyberConnect profiles and content in their applications. The API interfaces with a graph database that aggregates the CyberConnect social graph from across chains. Additionally, CyberConnect offers a recommendation engine that provides profile and content feed suggestions. Similar to Lens, standardized data and recommendation algorithms accelerate time to market for new front-end applications.
Also similar to Lens, CyberConnect interfaces with Lit Protocol to provide developers with access control and content scarcity tools. To further enhance privacy, CyberConnect is exploring features such as zero-knowledge proofs to provide user social graphs to downstream applications without revealing the exact details of the social graph data.
CyberConnect configuration files and content reside on a universal blockchain, making high-throughput messaging a feature that cannot be performed natively. Therefore, CyberConnect plans to announce integration with messaging protocols to provide secure end-to-end encrypted communication to its users.
pros and cons
CyberConnect’s core strength is its multi-chain deployment and data indexing pipeline. The aggregation of cross-chain and off-chain data sources allows CyberConnect to build a richer social graph than competing protocols. Because CyberConnect uses a graph database instead of a relational database to store its data, it extends the capabilities of its recommendation engine considering that graph-based algorithms are natively available.
While CyberConnect's EssenceNFT is promoted as allowing developers to issue credentials and use them as social posts, the protocol lacks native support for retweeted and commented content. While application developers can add this functionality themselves, it becomes only slightly more difficult compared to more socially deterministic protocols like Lens or Farcaster.
Similar to Lens, if CyberConnect's recommendation engine fails to meet application-specific needs, the social graph protocol may lose value capture to a front-end with its own scale for storing and processing data. However, re-creating the CyberConnect indexing process may be more difficult given the various cross-chain and off-chain inputs, making it valuable in its own right as part of an application developer's SDK.
Farcaster
Protocol design
Unlike smart contract-based networks Lens and CyberConnect, Farcaster is a network-based social graph that is currently invite-only on its testnet. Its profile ID is stored within the Farcaster contract on Ethereum, but the social graph is stored in a separate Farcaster hub network. Each hub in a peer-to-peer network broadcasts updates to each other, such as a new message (called a Cast in Farcaster). Broadcast updates, called incremental writes, are initiated by new user actions that add new nodes or connections to the social graph. There are six possible defined incremental writes in the Farcaster protocol:
Cast - a message sent by the user. Casts can be simple text posts or comments, or they can reference metadata stored elsewhere, such as IPFS for larger messages such as images or videos.
Reaction – Likes, retweets, and other types of simple message-specific actions from other users.
Amps – Forgoing traditional “follows”, Farcaster uses Amps to give the initiating user more exposure to another user’s content for a period of time (think of it as a temporary follow). Currently, the limit is 3 months and 100 Amps.
Varifications – Proofs of ownership are two-way signed messages that link a Farcaster wallet to another (e.g. an Ethereum wallet). They allow users to import NFTs and other assets into Farcaster without transferring tokens.
User data - standard metadata about the user, such as introduction, profile picture, etc.
Signers - Key pairs that the user is authorized to sign increments with. It is a special delta type that is initially set up to allow users to create additional messages.
Users can purchase a "fname," which is a human-readable name for use in Farcaster and represented by an NFT on the Ethereum mainnet. While similar to ENS names in implementation, fnames do have other properties such as recoverability and cheaper minting costs. These properties make them more suitable for social applications.
By extension, fnames also provides a viable business model, as proceeds from initial fnames sales and re-registrations can be used as profit or to incentivize the operation of the Hub. The namespace registration business model has historically been one of the few successful on-chain models, as ENS was second only to OpenSea in terms of on-chain revenue last year.
integrated
The front-end (client) integrates directly into the Farcaster Hub network by running its own Hub, or indirectly through a third-party API that indexes the network. With the app currently in a test network, only Farcaster sponsoring company Merkle Manufacturing is running hubs, but the goal is to open hubs in the first half of 2023. Therefore, network access to the frontend is currently through the Farcaster API. The API is currently very simple, with only chronological content endpoints and no dynamic recommendation engine. Given that Farcaster is hiring data engineers to build search and content recommendations, a more robust API may be in the works.
Given that Farcaster is web-based and in the early stages of development, there are no other third-party live integrations. While Farcaster's news is open and it currently lacks crypto-native functionality and digital scarcity elements, it's possible to speculate that Farcaster or applications develop integrations to enable such functionality in the future.
pros and cons
Along with its advantageously simple design, Farcaster can benefit in the long term by capturing the value of being a network-based social graph rather than a smart contract social graph. Hubs in the network will be the first to gain access to new messages, making them the first participants in that information. In a world where headlines can move markets and high-frequency bots dominate trading, having first access to information is a highly profitable position, and someone might pay to take advantage of it. So if Farcaster moves to a token-based model tied to network participation, the token could gain marginal value from that social MEV.
By far the biggest challenge facing Farcaster, and web-based social graph protocols in general, is information bloat. The volume of messages (data) sent by users can become so large that the cost of running nodes and P2P networks becomes unmanageable for decentralization. Farcaster has chosen to limit the amount of messages users can send to the network by deleting old messages.
While pruning preserves the scalability of the network, it does limit its value capture, as the hub can only retain about a year's worth of data for each user. If the best recommendation algorithms end up powering the most commonly used applications, and the best algorithms end up benefiting from the largest data sets, then data storage costs simply shift to the application level. Applications with the scale to index and store historical network data may create a competitive advantage.
Countryside
Protocol design
After launching a controversial product under the name BitClout in March 2021, DeSo continues to advance its unique layer 1 chain designed for social applications. The chain is currently a hybrid proof-of-work chain based on the Bitcoin algorithm, so it does not have functions such as smart contracts. However, in the first half of 2023, DeSo will undergo a hard fork that will move the network to a proof-of-stake design.
In order to customize the chain for social applications, DeSo abandoned the general chain and instead defined a core transaction model specific to social applications. Standard social activities such as posts and profile updates as well as NFT transaction types are defined at the network level. Additionally, DeSo defines financial transactions that support standard token swaps, as well as DeSo’s creator tokens and social tipping feature called Diamonds.
Diamonds act as a tipping mechanism for content creators. For every diamond tip a user receives, the more DeSo tokens they earn. Creator Coins are automatically allocated to accounts and can be purchased in exchange for DESO tokens. Hypothetically, as a certain account becomes popular, people will want to hold (buy) this creator's coins, causing the price to increase for existing holders.
All content in DeSo is stored on-chain, with the exception of raw images and videos, either in a centralized provider like Google Cloud or a decentralized provider like IPFS. With this design, the chain's state keeps growing, limiting its long-term decentralization potential.
pros and cons
DeSo's main advantage is also its disadvantage. As the network expands to accommodate different social applications, it becomes exponentially more difficult to maintain. As the state continues to expand with new posts and transactions, DeSo nodes will eventually struggle to cover the cost of storing all this data. So while in the short to medium term DeSo will be able to scale based on its design decisions, at some point the choice will be either decentralization with prolific low-cost nodes, or a more centralized chain with extremely high costs per node .
Another major drawback of DeSo is the design space provided to application developers. Without universal smart contracts, it is almost difficult to build novel crypto-native functionality. Instead, apps are forced to use deterministic features coded by the DeSo team, such as creator coins and tipping functionality. However, with the upcoming hard fork, DeSo is introducing access control and correlation, which really expands the application design possibilities.
social graph attractiveness
Of the four major social graph protocols, Lens has the most traction. Its momentum has been fueled in part by the heavily promoted ETHGlobal hackathon, which attracted numerous developers and projects. In turn, users are attracted to the products built, resulting in more than 100,000 Lens profile accounts, with approximately 24,000 active accounts each month.
Farcaster and CyberConnect are both earlier in their launch process, so they have less overall appeal than Lens. Although DeSo is the longest active protocol and the only one not in a closed launch, it has 75% fewer active posting users (~5,500 people) than Lens. Additionally, because DeSo is low-cost and open to everyone, DeSo’s content is more dominated by bots.
While Lens dominates the market, no social graph protocol has seen a truly compelling, differentiated product built on top of it. Therefore, early adopter metrics do not reflect the target market for the next “killer” app.
More important at this early stage (1 million users and below) is protocol design. The design potential of new business models means more than just the initial number of users of a first-generation application. That said, the functionality and product direction of this first generation of apps does predict how front-ends might eventually package functionality and try to compete in an open source, open data environment.
Front-end application
The application layer combines all the functionality exposed in the social layer into a familiar user experience. While each application uses largely the same underlying components, applications' use cases vary and generally fall into three broad categories:
Entertainment Apps – Social feeds, video sharing, and other apps primarily for connection and entertainment.
Workplace Apps – Group and DAO tools focused on coordinating tasks. Traditional examples include Slack and Discord and task management apps Asana and Trello. While not yet connected to DeSoc, cryptographic applications such as Console, Dework, and Wonder will all be crypto-native examples.
Free Apps – Adjacent apps that offer services such as NFT trading often integrate profiles in some limited way because profiles are not core to the product or service.
While entertainment apps like social feeds are considered the core use cases for social apps, workplace apps are responsible for a huge amount of content created every day. In large companies, millions of PowerPoint slides and memos are created with the sole purpose of communicating with others within the organization. This form of content is created and then shared via email or Slack rather than traditional social media channels.
As DAOs shift efforts from a closed to an open paradigm, the stereotypical role of the content creator will expand significantly to include more tangible and useful things rather than entertainment content creation. This untapped pool of content creators remains a huge growth opportunity for DeSoc as the requirements for commercial content creation (i.e. financial aspects and certifications) strongly favor the crypto track over the traditional social media track.
For now, most front-end applications built on decentralized social graph protocols are entertainment-centric. Many of these apps are social feed apps focused primarily on the Lens ecosystem.
lenses
The top three Lens apps by number of posts—Lenster, Phaver, and Orb—are all social subscription protocols. Lenster is a web-based Twitter-like application with the largest number of weekly posters, over 35,000. Since launch, Lenster has accounted for approximately 30-50% of all weekly posts on Lens, and over 90% of browser-based Lens posts. Over the past four weeks, weekly Lenster posts have grown 44%, outpacing the 7% growth of Phaver, the second largest front end.
Phaver
Phaver is a mobile app built on Lens with all the standard social features. Its main purpose is to introduce unique gamification features to incentivize future activities and reward users. Each user can “stake” tokens on posts they believe will be followed by others. If the post performs well, users will be rewarded with additional tokens. Additionally, users can post their content in "Premium Channels." After sacrificing some points, content publishers will be able to earn additional points for each user who subsequently stakes on a post.
This incentive mechanism rewards both top content creators and top curators (stakers). Additionally, it prevents spam since paid posts incur fees. However, staking on post is currently free, which results in a skewed incentive to post frequently until the cost is turned on. As a result, Phaver has nearly 40% of posts dedicated to Lens, but only 9% of secondary engagement from comments and retweets.
Orb
Orb is a Lens-based iOS mobile app that is one of the fastest-growing Lens frontends, growing by more than X% after launching last month. In addition to its content feed, Orb also offers video, podcasts, music and chat features on its platform as part of its recently released content. Additionally, Orb integrates with Wav3s, a growth tool that allows users to boost their content by incentivizing other users to repost it within their network. By embracing tools like Wav3s, which is part of the broader Web3 Growth Stack, Orb and other applications can quickly incentivize user adoption and engagement in a way that traditional platforms cannot.
CyberConnect
While CyberConnect doesn't have as robust an application ecosystem as other social graph protocols, it has gained decent traction with its uniquely positioned Link3 offering. Link3 is both a global social identity similar to Linktree and an active product. It allows users to host webinars and issue NFTs (W3ST) to attendees indicating their attendance, as well as run draws locally for attendees. Hosted by Kyle Samani and others, CyberConnect’s 2023 Summit is hosted entirely on the Link3 platform.
The platform has minted more than 1.1 million NFT certificates of attendance since its launch, and through December, the number of unique NFTs issued each week and the number of unique collectors were at or near all-time highs.
Farcaster
Given that the network is in its early stages of development, the vast majority of activity is driven by Farcaster's own client, a Twitter-like mobile app that was recently released on the App Store. While usage of the network and its app accounts for approximately 10% of active posters on Lens, the network has a highly engaged user base. Nearly half of active posters have been posting consistently for more than three months, with nearly 75% of those posting for a month or more.
While Farcaster's apps have driven the majority of usage of the network so far (largely due to Hubs still being closed), a number of new customers have recently joined, such as Purple, Omilos and Discove. Each client offers a similar social feed style platform with marginal improvements such as curated feeds for a variety of topics. However, there have been recent alpha-stage projects like Pixel Pool that aim to move away from Twitter-like products and serve video on top of Farcaster.
Once Hubs open, the number of front-ends and the variety of their functionality will likely increase.
So
While DeSo has a range of apps that extend from blogging apps to fundraising apps, more than 75% of web posts come from just three social apps:
Desofy – A mobile social media app and the DeSo app with the highest number of posts. The app, powered by the DeSo Foundation, allows users to earn money by tipping diamonds and selling NFTs.
Diamond – A web-based social feed product powered by the DeSo team. Its features include all monetization aspects of DeSo, enabling users to publish short and long-form content on the site in addition to images and videos.
DeSocialWorld – A multilingual social feed designed to cater to a global audience. It also showcases most of DeSo’s features, including content and monetization.
Currently, the feature sets of the apps are very similar, given DeSo's deterministic design. However, with the upcoming hard fork, DeSo will introduce access groups to build more custom features.
One problem, however, is the lack of independent projects built on DeSo. Given that DeSo is one of the only social graph protocols open to all users, most usage is through DeSo-sponsored applications, with little to gain from building independently.
Competitive dynamics
Since any application can display a user's posts, friends, and overall social graph, users are free to choose any front-end to participate in their network. However, this user mobility brings fierce competition to the front-end layer that is not found in traditional social applications. This competition comes from the network effect advantages retained by the social layer, while the front end lacks a strong moat to retain users.
The front end can build a competitive moat in two ways: through a token model like Phaver, or by building advanced recommendation algorithms into its own indexing process.
While token models and loyalty programs can drive user adoption and retention, successful moats have traditionally been driven by scale. In a world where airdrops and token models are driving down fees in industries like DeFi, a front-end that can scale to support custom data collection, indexing, and recommendation capabilities may be more sustainable. Additionally, the user data used to build the recommendation engine becomes richer over time because the front end has richer information about the user's interaction with the product (time on page, scrolling behavior, etc.).
Over longer time horizons, the potential increased data collection and scale of the front-end layer creates competitive risks for the social layer. If the front end could scale beyond all competitors, the incentive to write data back to the social graph would be significantly diminished, reducing the potential value capture of the social graph protocol.
polymerization
While most frontends are specific to a specific social graph, there's nothing stopping a frontend from spanning multiple social graph protocols and aggregating content for users. An early example of this stylistic approach is Yup, which spans Lens, Farcaster, Mirror and even Twitter.
In Web2 businesses, aggregators tend to be the primary business model identified by Ben Thompson. However, a key difference between Web2 aggregators and encrypted aggregators is the accessibility of the underlying data. Popular aggregators like Google, Facebook, and others aggregate information that would be difficult, but not impossible, for individual users or small companies to collect.
In cryptocurrencies, with their open data and social graphs, the convenience of aggregation is too low to be a sustainable moat. While there are benefits to having customer relationships, maintaining them in the face of a barrage of airdrops and other incentive tactics is difficult. However, if aggregators manage to reach the scale where they index and process data (instead of reading it), then the aggregation business model may once again overcome otherwise unfavorable competitive dynamics.
Summarize
Money serves as a motivating force that drives human movement, just as physical forces concentrate energy into less concentrated areas. When the incentive power of platforms fails to balance $230 billion with nearly $6 billion for creators, there is a huge incentive power to attract developers to create balancing technology, and to attract creators to adopt it.
DeSoc's open architecture enables anyone to build applications on top of the social graph. Without major network effects barriers, the viability of new social applications and business models is greatly expanded—for both traditional creators of entertainment applications and knowledge worker creators.
However, front-end applications need to build crypto-native functionality that provides compelling value to users (i.e., beyond traditional social in the crypto space). Given the current state of apps and app infrastructure, it will likely take some time for DeSoc to complete its feature pilot phase before becoming the foundation for people's identities online.