Why web3 social could be bigger than Facebook

Season 6, Episode 18 of the Mint Podcast with Adam Levy features Stani Kulechov. He is the founder of Aave: one of crypto’s largest decentralized non-custodial liquidity protocols, and Lens Protocol: a decentralized social graph for building web3 social platforms.

One of the biggest applications in web3 social is creating a profile for someone that belongs to that individual and allows for portability between applications. Web2 social media companies solved the problem of creating and distributing content globally across the internet by providing platforms for peers to connect with shared interests. In web3, the challenge is what to recreate, if any, in a decentralized manner (e.g., Twitter or Instagram), or finding new web3 social applications.

As a creator in the current web2 social space, you can build up an audience on specific platforms, such as Twitter, and generate massive amounts of user-generated content to feed content liquidity into these platforms, but ultimately the platforms benefit the most from that content. Creators do not have the portability of their audience or a direct way to monetize their work. Stani states that:

“Having an on-chain profile would mean that you could actually have the ownership of the audience you create, and your self-expression, and no one can actually take that away from you.”

Lens protocol allows anyone to create a profile once and retain ownership of that profile without being locked into a specific platform. As a user, you have access to any application built on top of the protocol without needing to give up your follower base or profile into one application, which opens up freedom for users.

Users now have skin in the game and can find content that best suits their values or content they like the most. All content on Lens can be collectible as an NFT, meaning that the market, users, and followers can benchmark and decide what content is valuable based on how they collect.

As a creator, you can create digital art as a collection and make it available to purchase or somehow gain within the community. He adds that:

“Being able to actually create the content right on spot and also having your own distribution channel. It’s equals the same as walking with your own social network. You can choose like how all these applications are reflecting your content.”

Lenster is a community for building applications that has the potential to be similar to Reddit in terms of sub-communities (subreddits). It allows you to have the user experience you desire, with community values and algorithms most aligned with yourself. All in all:

“Your social graph is the strength of your social capital.”