Lens Protocol: The Stepping Stone Towards Decentralised Social Media
What is Lens? Well, think Twitter, YouTube, News … but bigger and better!
Lens Protocol is a Web3 social graph originally built on the Polygon POS blockchain, designed to empower creators to form fully composable, user owned content and social relationships within the Web3 space. Over the last few months, Lens has slowly been opening up their whitelist to increase the amount of people minting their .lens handle. You can check to see if you’re eligible to mint your handle here.
Lens and Web3
Over the last few months we have started to see a gradual increase in projects emerging with the intention of bringing the Web3 world to life. These projects are laying the foundation for the day that we can finally take a step back and see our vision of a truly decentralised and online world brought to life. Decentralisation, blockchain technologies and token based economics are all concepts that are incorporated into these projects, however now that we have all of these truly great projects built and thriving, there is no base for them to live on. That’s where Lens comes in. Lens has provided that base for projects to build, develop and create on, where they all exist in the same ecosystem and allow all types of buildoors, creatoors and many more, to help grow this social platform.
Why do we need decentralised social media?
In the current digital age, we find ourselves always complaining about social media and how it is fast evolving to what companies think we want, opposed to what we want. To put it simply, it’s not designed to empower creators, it’s designed to empower whoever it chooses. The most simplistic way that Lens can change this is by allowing users to be able to autonomously create a social media profile and presence without the hassle of consistently poor change. Building social media platforms on Web3 allows us to interact with DeFi services from our social media account, and own our presence in the ecosystem. To put it simply, web3 can give us:
No restrictions
No shadow banning
No risk of losing your online profile
Ownership of your domain name - it can NEVER be erased!
Being able to autonomously make a social media account without including your most personal information - Web3 proves that we don't need to supply our personal information for data harvesting to enjoy what we already have
You see what you want to see - no more related posts or random videos
No ads from data harvesting that are sold as “customising to your needs”
No risk of a company going broke or sold to a corporate entity for monetary gain
100% ownership of your digital identity
What more could you possibly want?
How can we move from a stepping stone to the future?
As the title of this article suggests, Lens Protocol is currently a stepping stone towards decentralised social media but that doesn’t mean they can’t BE the future. Lens is currently not long term sustainable on the Polygon POS chain, as we move towards global adoption of Ethereum, we will eventually see higher fees, and the best way for Lens to adapt to these changes is by transferring onto a rollip onto layer 2. Rumour on the street is that Polygon will be converting the POS chain to a rollup so let’s stay tuned and see if/when that happens?
Lens Protocol is still deploying new and exciting projects onto their platform, and still in their early stages. We can only imagine what they have coming and I for one can’t wait to see how well they adapt to the ever growing ecosystem that we all love.
Have you minted your Lens handle? Drop it in the comment section below :)