Decentralized social media takes advantage of tokenization and on-chain transactions, allowing you to carry your profile, connections, and preferences between different platforms: one identity and all of your favorite platforms in a plug & play package.

What is a Social Graph?

In order to understand Decentralized Social, we must first get a grasp on how traditional social media works.

Web2 platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok collect data from their users to cater your experience (and show you ads). In order to achieve this, they leverage a technology called a Social Graph. Picture a big excel sheet containing all off your likes, watch time, follows and closest connections.

If you’ve ever used those apps that let you see who your closest friends on Twitter are, congratulations, you’ve seen the potential of the social graph.

Projects like Lens Protocol ask, "What if that information belonged to each participant and they could use it for something besides selling products?".

And thus, decentralized social came to be. By packaging this data as NFTs and keeping track of the interactions coming from your wallet, anyone pulling from the social graph can cater your experience around what you've done on other platforms—even keeping all of your followers and friends with you no matter which app you choose to use.

Why Should it be Decentralized?

Besides the obvious benefit of carrying your data around different platforms, there are other exciting perks to having decentralized social graphs. Among these are:

• Don’t like the algorithm? Build another one! We’ve all heard about Twitter and Instagram’s infamous algos. By allowing the data to flow freely, you can feasibly build your own recommendation engines and curation platforms on top of the data provided by decentralized social (given the time and expertise to do so).
• Censorship resistance: Your content is yours to keep. Whatever you post in a decentralized social platform will be safely stored in IPFS and/or Arweave. This means you don’t have to worry about suddenly losing everything you’ve created if another government were to restrict your access, for example.
• Interoperability between platforms: In the same way you can post on Instagram and Facebook simultaneously, you can build exciting interactions among decentralized social platforms. Even experimenting with token-gating content on one platform for your followers on another.

A new Creator Ecosystem.

NFTs, Social Tokens, and similar technologies offer a ton of potential for independent creators, but what we’ve always lacked is a tool to bring them all together and harness their full potential.

A decentralized social offers the missing piece of the puzzle. By allowing your audience to be as much a part of your on-chain journey as the value you create. Sure, your content can get you some momentum, but only by allowing the people who believe in you to build on top of what you create can you achieve greatness together.

Your most avid fans can help you bridge your content to other platforms. You can experiment with token gated access and open editions on your best stuff. A world of possibility just opened for what you can achieve with a community.

What are Some of the Platforms?