August 30, 2022: Through the Looking Glass 🔎🧐
Is Lens Protocol the Web3 Social Network We Need?
Although the crypto community mostly exists outside Twitter’s radar, the company’s proclivity for censorship makes it an exceedingly risky platform. Is Lens Protocol a viable alternative?
For a long time we’d avoided the platform, thinking we’d need an invite code. As it turns out, it’s relatively easy to get started. Simply signing their petition, which we happened to agree with, was enough to kick off the process.
The onboarding process was simple, cost nothing, and had our account up and running on the platform in a manner of minutes. Creating a backup account on Lens is a no-nonsense step we’d recommend to anybody in the space.
Usage of Lens is refreshingly easy. Occasionally signing of transactions is required, but they also have a dispatcher contract to reduce this if you like. Their web interface is intuitive for anybody who has familiarity with Twitter with a few additional features like fee collections that make it an arguably superior experience.
Twitter’s NFT interface is tacked-on and clunky, whereas the ability to collect posts as NFTs on Lens is wired innately into the system. Building on Polygon makes it incredibly affordable to use. The only downside for an L1 purist is the necessity to continue switching wallets to Polygon, but the simplicity of using a browser wallet for sign-in is a great experience.
In its decade of operation, Twitter’s not done much to innovate and largely closed its API to further forestall devs from building atop the platform. Meanwhile Lens is already seeing some fun innovations built atop its more open API.
So the big question, are enough people using it to make it a viable platform? A gazillion competitive social media companies have sprung up over the past decade. None have achieved the scale or size to become the sort of “digital town square” feeling. Does Lens have a hope to achieve where others failed?
More than most niches, social media is likely to see a major leap in innovation from a wholly reimagined Web3 platform. The various advantages of building directly atop an immutable ledger could seriously one-up the entire experience with some clever tokenomics while also giving users ownership of their content.
Boomers may recall it’s been tried before in Twetch, an earlier attempt at building an on-chain social network using Bitcoin: Satoshi’s Vision. Twetch had decent adoption from Bitcoiners, and tokenomics baked right into their platform. However, its Bitcoin roots make it a bit of an awkward fit for the Ethereum community, giving Lens a potential opening to become the gathering spot for ETH-heads.
The crypto community is largely drawn towards Twitter mostly because it already has critical mass — everybody is already there. Other than that, their algorithm is functional, having been fed enough content to know what goes viral, providing a decent user experience.
In theory, an advantage of Twitter is that your content could escape your immediate echo chamber and reach a wider audience. In practice, crypto users on Twitter are aggressively segregated from the rest of the site. As long as your content doesn’t leave the silo and pollute the timelines of their A-list, they pretty much don’t care.
It amounts to a bug for crypto people though. Using Twitter, you’ll be pushed endless tweets and ads for irrelevant pop culture nonsense nobody cares about. Has their schlocky “What’s happening” bar ever delivered anything of relevance? Mine is presently pushing a laundry list of the least likely items to ever draw a click from me:
R. Kelly
WWE
the Bachelorette
Something called “Stranger Things”
Updates about a three year old virus.
What are the odds I would ever voluntarily engage with such content. Even under threat of violence I might opt to lose a toe before seeing what it’s about. I have to imagine it’s among the biggest wastes of internet real estate in human history.
In contrast, normie Twitter accounts will never see a shred of Web3 content unless they choose to interact with it. Try creating a burner and don’t follow anybody from crypto. You’ll never even know DeFi exists. If you do tread down the rabbit hole you’ll be pushed a lot of Bitcoin maxis. The idea that any of our content could reach outside the echo chamber on Twitter is a pure pipe dream.
The relatively small crypto community should make the easy migration to a superior platform, especially since we lose nothing in the process. It feels like an obviously advantageous move to adopt a platform that is likely to make crypto central to the experience, as opposed to a platform where we’ll always be pigeonholed and marginalized. It will likely require some sort of trigger to launch a movement, hence Twitter censors gradually to keep the frogpot at a low simmer.
Lens has one built-in feature that could smooth this process, and we’d argue everybody should set it up and start using it today. They’ve set up an easy “reflect” feature, which automatically reposts your Lens post on Twitter. It’s a no-brainer to get in the habit of posting all your content using this feature — why not start building up your Lens profile at the same time as you maintain your activity on Twitter?
If nothing else, don’t you feel better feeding a platform that actually wants you? It’s particularly low hanging fruit for up-and-coming content creators who may have trouble cutting through the noise on Twitter.
For our sake, we’re moving Lens-first. We plan to syndicate most of our content through to Twitter, but we’ll keep some exclusive to Lens. We’ll be aiming to build and promote a community of flywheel-related content on the site — so please find us there and ping us to get some follows and shares!