Social media is experiencing a renaissance. The Big Tech walled garden strategy from social media companies is being challenged by open social networks providing users with the ability to own their content and connections. From Myspace to Tik Tok, the social media landscape is centralized and dependent on companies storing your personal data in servers owned by the company. For example, when you use Facebook, you are asking the company’s servers permission to access your data. If Facebook or the servers of any company experience downtime, then you are unable to access your data. This model of social media requires trust in centralized companies, a prerequisite becoming increasingly challenging to the public this past decade. Web3 resolves this concern by enabling self-custody of user data and globally accessible decentralized applications (DApps) not dependent on a single company.
Lens protocol is an open social network that allows users to own their social graph, enabling users to switch between social media applications while their content, connections, and data follow them across the internet. From the makers of Aave and Family, this user-centric model addresses censorship and data ownership, offering identity and data portability while providing the freedom to leave an application without losing the content and connections grown on a social media platform over time. Lens is U.S. Dollar native with transactions settled in GHO, a USD pegged stablecoin backed by collateral in the Aave protocol. Lens is open source and permissionless, allowing third-party developers to build on the network. One such application is Orb Club.
Despite an estimated 617 million digital asset owners worldwide and +220 million monthly active wallet addresses, only 30-60 million are monthly active users. The fragmented and unfriendly user-experience has hindered mainstream adoption of Web3 applications. Orb Club approaches this challenge from a design first philosophy, featuring an intuitive interface accessible to those familiar with traditional mobile applications, seeking to ease the onboarding from Web 2.0 to Web3. Minimal use of “crypto jargon” is found in the application, with the word “NFT” replaced by “digital collectible”, a strategy employed by Fortune 500 companies such as Mattel for their digital asset offerings in the retail space.
Communication on Orb Club captures Generation Z and A cultures with users responding to social media posts via “stickers” reminiscent of memes, created and monetizable by users. Additionally, social media participants can create “Clubs”, a cross between a DAO and Reddit. Imagine if a subreddit community had a treasury. Monetization is natively built into the social network with NFTs serving as a fabric of the social layer. Social media posts are digital collectibles providing users several strategies from revenue sharing to limited edition releases. Leading credence to the a16z State of Crypto 2024 report observation that NFT activity appears to be shifting from high-volume secondary markets to low-cost social collecting experiences.
Will the established social media giants relinquish market share to open social networks such as Lens, Farcaster, and OpenSocial? Or will they adapt and embrace user-owned social graphs and experimental monetization strategies? The paradigm shift from walled gardens to open social networks is a major change in data ownership, traditional business models, and how we interact with others worldwide. Open social networks are in their infancy and the promises of decentralized social media will not happen overnight. Anyone old enough to remember AOL and Netscape could never imagine the world we live in today. Like the internet of the 90s, only time will reveal the evolution and impact of this technology.
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