Web 3.0 Social Protocols, What are they and why are they so popular?

In this post, we introduce one of the most heated concepts in the Web 3.0 world — social protocols. We begin with the current drawbacks of Web 2.0 social media platforms. Then, we dive into the specifics of four popular social protocols: Nostr, AT Protocol, Lens Protocol, and Cent. In this section, we also made a horizontal comparison between Web3.Bar and Damus, a sub-product of the Nostr Protocol. Finally, the document closes off by listing some of the strengths of these protocols, such as scalability, censorship resistance, and zero advertisements from service providers.

Image from Tokeninsight

The Web 3.0 social protocols refer to a set of decentralized protocols that enable the creation of decentralized social networks, allowing users to interact with each other and share content without relying on centralized intermediaries like Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. Here are a few reasons why the current social platforms necessitates the influx of new protocols:

• web2 social platforms have advertisements
• web2 social platforms have been using techniques to keep you addicted
• web2 social platforms usually do not show the historical feed for the people you know
• web2 social platforms ban people
• web2 social platforms shadowban people
• web2 social platforms contain spammers and spam messages

We have researched a few popular protocols and will discuss their working mechanisms, unique features, and current traffics in the remainder of this article.

Nostr

Picture from WealthMastery

Nostr is an open protocol for creating a censorship-resistant global social network. It allows users to connect with each other without the need for a centralized social platform. Users can write posts and sign them with their key, then send them to other relays to publish. Users can also follow other users by querying the relays for posts from their public key. Relay servers can charge a fee for people to publish or store large amounts of data, and anyone can run a relay. Nostr is highly scalable, censorship and ban resistant, and contains zero advertisements from service providers.

Mechanisms & Functionalities:

1. Everyone has a client (native or web based) and identified by a public key; Find friends (9k+ people have verified their accounts on this website); You can also add a NIP-05 Identifier
2. You write a post and sign it with your key and send it to other relays (servers hosted by people) to publish it; Clients fetch data from relays of their choice and publish data to other relays of their choice. A relay doesn’t talk to another relay, only directly to users.
3. In order to receive updates, you ask the other relays if they know the people you asked for; for example, if you follow someone, the user instruct their clients to query the relays it knows for posts from that public key
4. Relay can be ran by anyone, and can only accept posts and forward to others.
5. Signatures are always verified on the clients end
6. Nos2x — allows you to sign events on your web browser without giving the private keys
7. NostrNest — allows you to chat with others in a room, similar like Twitter Space, but it is on the nostr protocol

Damus

Damus is the major social application that is based on Nostr. Once launched, it rapidly became one of the most popular web3 social platforms online. Upon launch day, it acquired 45,000 active users.

Differentiation between Twitter and Damus:

1. Micropayments are easy, tip on posts, individuals and even DMs are introduced
2. Discussions are more towards web3 and crypto
3. technical questions and insights on social protocols
4. Much less spamming messages or random people advertising (higher community devotion)

Current Damus’ Drawbacks that users need to get accustomed to:

• Sharing their public keys before adding each other
• Their relays are very hard to find and locate (list here)
• Photos can not upload from local drives
• @ people in post always need to use their public keys, this can be a boring process when you are posting regularly

Comparison with Web3.Bar

1. Unlike Damus, Web3.Bar is an integrated interface that allows you to watch Netflix, play games, and enjoy streams while chatting with others using the Nostr Protocol
2. Users enjoy a greater degree of customization on Web3.Bar, where they could design their own private/public virtual chatroom for their audience and friends
3. Users can take advantage of their NFTs and “vitalize” them as their identity on Web3.Bar
4. Monetization can be simple on Web3.Bar, users can sell their minted virtual chatrooms, set fees to enter their private chatrooms, and more.
5. Privacy, freedom and censorship resistance are guaranteed in the same way as on Damus

AT Protocol

The second protocol AT (previously known as Authenticated Data Experiment ADX) is developed by Bluesky, its main objective is self-authentication.

Mechanisms & Functionalities:

• Open-Sourced developmental process (all their codes are under MIT license)
• Not a blockchain but a federated protocol
• Users are identified using domain names and secures the users information through cryptographic URLs
• User data is stored in signed repositories (self authenticated)
• Uses Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs), enables users to prove control without a third-party
• Schema Network called Lexicon is used to unify the names and calls across servers
• Small world vs big world
• Small-world: delivery of events targeted at specific users such as mentions, replies, and DMs, and sync of datasets according to follow graphs. Uses Personal Data Services
• Big-world: large-scale metrics (likes, reposts, followers), content discovery (algorithms), and user search. Uses indexing services
• Users data are always backed on their clients

However, the AT protocol suffers from several drawbacks. The first being it is not a blockchain based protocol, which means it may not be fully decentralized and lacks the full confidence from the blockchain and Web3 community. The second issue with the AT protocol is that their major source of funding is from Twitter. Although Musk have agree to invest, chances of fund withdraw are high.

Lens Protocol

Since mid-2022, Lens Protocol has been very popular among Web3 communities. It’s main goal is to create an composable and decentralized social graph that allows users to connect with each other and earn rewards. It features a distributed ledger to store users’ data, incentivization layer, and an application layer. The protocol utilizes a graph database based on graph structures that contain individual nodes, edges as connection points between them, places, things, and other properties to store data. Lens Protocol also involves a reward system where users can stake tokens to become validators and rewards them for maintaining the layer. The application layer helps developers to build their own social application on the protocol, providing a set of APIs that allow developers to interact with the protocol and leverage the graph database and incentivization layer. Additionally, users’ profiles are generated into NFTs.

Profiles Created Weekly on Lens Protocol (Dune)

Lens Protocol Traffic

So far, there are dozens of applications that have been created based on Lens Protocol. Here are some of the most frequently used applications.

Lenster

Lenster aims to create a composable and decentralized social graph. It allows users to connect with each other and earn rewards, and creators can also reward fans who engage actively. Lenster users’ profiles are generated into NFTs.

Main Usage Scenario:

1. Post daily routines
2. Share ETH related contents such as ethpass
3. Outreach and connect with the community for companies

Lenstube

Lenstube is a decentralized video sharing social media. Currently, most of the videos that are shared on the site is short and not longer than 1 minute. Most of the videos currently on Lenstube have an average of 40 likes

Main Usage Scenario:

1. Post Bytes (short videos that are similar to Instagram reels)
2. Allow KOLs to connect with audience, subcriptions available

DiverseHQ

DiverseHQ dedicates its to audience growth and it aims to be the next Reddit in the Web3.0 community.

Main Usage Scenario:

1. Keep your followers and posts on the lens diagram
2. Easy to post contents to the platform and make money (access will limited to the buyers but with community exposure)
3. Gamify social interactions, there will be content tournaments that winner will receive prizes
4. Exclusive Community Building: token holders will have rights on content access and posting rights

Cent

Built on Ethereum blockchain, Cent protocol aims to be the marketplace for creators to connect with fans and earn rewards. In return, the creators can reward fans who engaged actively.

Sub-product:

• Valuables (tweets can be auctioned as NFT) — Jack Dorsey sold his first tweet on valuables
• Cent Pages — empowering people with no knowledge in NFT to create them and engage with followers directly; The platform helps to store your audiences’ email addresses and you can bring the data to any website or platform you want to use; Its free and ad-free
• The Collect Button — an embed that immediately turns website, arts, recordings or anything into NFT

To date, many of the aforementioned Web 3.0 protocols are still developing. But their current capabilities and future potential are promising. Here, we list some of the most vital strengths that protocols like Nostr offer, and we hope to continue seeing similar products flourish in the near future:

• Users now have the irrevocable ownership on their private and public keys to handle their usernames
• All events are specified in formats (public key, signature, timestamp, type, content payload) to ensure that they are not altered
• For nostr, you can prevent them from posting content to your relay server, but you cannot prevent them from view contents on your server or stop others to view their content on another server.
• Highly scalable: anyone can build on the protocol and establish servers
• Censorship and ban-resistant
• Zero advertisement from service providers

Want more content like this? Stay tuned for our next post on Medium by following/joining our social media channels:

Discord Channel: Web3.bar

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Hint: We will take a deep dive into Nostr, the decentalized future of social media, in our next post!