Category: Web 3.0

Is Aave making the case for decentralized social media?

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, DeFi, Innovation, Web 3.0Leave a comment

What shall we call ‘decentralized social media’? Decentralized finance was easily turned into DeFi, but DeSM or DeSocMed doesn’t have quite the same ring. Still, somebody will come up with a shortened version in time.

One of the proponents of decentralized social media is Stani Kulechov, the founder of the Aave DeFi protocol. He has been tweeting teasers about his support for decentralized SM platforms, pointing out that there is a widespread belief that the current SM platforms generally ‘suck’. Twitter has also been talking about it, which surely points to that’s the way it is considering going.

According to The Defiant, five persons in crypto told the website that Kulechov has sent them a cryptic text asking them to sign up to ‘lens.dev. However, The Defiant was unable to find out from Aave or Kulechov any more information about this site.

The Lens Protocol

Follow the lens.dev link yourself and you’ll find yourself at a simple site that contains a  short letter expressing dissatisfaction with Web2.0 social media companies, such as Facebook and Twitter. The letter says, “Web3 brings forth a renewed hope for what social media can be. It offers the ability for us to control how our content is used. We can have the power to own and monetize our content and community with no middlemen or centralized data harvesting.”

Should you wish to sign the letter, you do so with a tweet. The tweet includes a cryptographic signature that uses their Ethereum wallet and text that usually reads “I should own this tweet @lensprotocol #digitalroots.”

This is not the first attempt to decentralize social media. Other efforts include STEEM, which emphasized blogging; FEEDWEAVE, which was built on Arweave and Cent is an experiment in selling content. None of them have made much impact on the SM world, but as The Defiant says, “the top minds in the space seem to believe that this is still a crackable use case for one blockchain or another.” Indeed, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX said, “I think social media on the blockchain — I continue to think this could be absolutely huge. I think it solves a lot of existing pain points, which are really coming to the forefront of society right now.” Of the others who have been talking up the idea, one supporter is Vitalik Buterin, who has proposed an SM platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. However, perhaps Aave will beat him to it, and these cryptic tweets are just the beginning of the platform’s attempt to finally deliver a blockchain-based, decentralized social media platform. Then perhaps we’ll know what to call it!

Web 3 is nothing new

On By mehranmuslimiblogIn Blockchain, Metaverse, NFTs, Web 3.0Leave a comment

The idea of a decentralized web has been in the minds of many for around 20 years, but when you read much of the press about it today, you’d be forgiven for believing it was a brand new concept.

The concept is a response to the domination of Web 2.0 by the Big Tech companies, Facebook and Google in particular, explains Michael J. Casey, and their “data-driven economics.” Most of us understand by now exactly how those two companies in particular exploited the web and us, even as at the same time they reunited us with old friends, helped us grow businesses and made searching so more intuitive. After all, who remembers using search engines in the era Before Google? It was much slower and you really needed to know how to search.

However there is quite some debate raging around the concept of Web 3. On the one hand, as Casey reports, there is Chris Dixon who is a fervent Web 3 supporter and a believer that Web 3 projects are creating real value, and on the other, Jack Dorsey, who claims the “term is just a buzzword exploited by venture capitalists to boost their equity and token investment.” Casey says in response to this, “That smart people – including two famous “Tims” – have been exploring an exit from Web 2.0 for so long suggests Web 3 projects have worthy ambitions and that there will be public benefits and business payoffs if they succeed.” But he concedes, “this long history reminds us that solving a very big problem is hard and that investors would be wise to take grandiose promises with a grain of salt.”

It is possible not to side with either Chris or Jack, and instead focus on the core structural issues with Web 2.0 and why there’s a need to change them. The fundamental problem with Web 2.0 is the misalignment between the interests of the giant companies that dominate the Internet and those of the general public. Casey says that whilst blockchain is a solution, it is not the only one. As Casey says, “We need a mix of technologies (both decentralized and centralized), regulation and economic rationale to enable business models that bring those competing private and public interests together.”

Let’s not forget that Tim Berners-Lee, the father of the Internet, said in 2006 that the web needed an overhaul. He allegedly coined the term Web 3.0, in reference to the evolution of universal data formats and artificial intelligence removing the need for intermediation by third parties to allow a true “machine-to-machine” communication network.

Currently, Web 3.0 is primarily associated with blockchain, cryptocurrency and NFTs, and the debate is still ongoing about what Web 3.0 could potentially be in the end, but as Casey remarks, there is still a long way to go before we can escape The Matrix!