Making Web3 Social

Over the past few months, I've been reflecting on how often I turn to social media when I want to learn something new or connect with people around me. Social media has become an integral part of almost every aspect of our lives. Whether we’re eating, traveling, or going about our daily activities, we are posting it online and sharing it with our connections. Almost 93% of all internet users are active on social media (University of Maine Social Media Statistics).

However, when we upload our data to social media platforms, we often grant those platforms the right to use, display, and distribute that data within the platform and beyond. These rights are typically included in the terms of service (Who owns your data?). Although we technically own our own data, social media platforms have the ability to modify, delete, add to, reproduce, and distribute any content that we publicly upload to the platform. Most importantly, our data can be used in promotional materials for these social media platforms, enabling them to profit from user-generated content (Instagram Terms of Use).

So how can we take control of the narrative and turn those profits into our own? The everyday user who creates the occasional popular or viral content but doesn’t have the fan base to earn brand deals should still be rewarded for their content — especially if the platforms they are posting on are able to use it for multiple profitable purposes, such as advertising, data mining, and powering algorithms, products, and insights that generate ongoing revenue.

Enter Web3. Social networks built on the blockchain don’t control and maintain their users’ data the way Web2 platforms do (Web3 Social Media: The Future of Digital Connection). Web3 social networks are composed of three main components: ownership, aligned incentives, and community (Demystifying web3). Ownership means that there is a cryptographically verifiable way to prove that an asset or piece of intellectual property belongs to someone without relying on a centralized authority (What does ownership mean in Web3?). Aligned incentives refer to models where developers, users, and investors all benefit from events on the network. Community, in some sense, is the most difficult term to define. In Web2, a community is built around a single person or brand (think a fanbase). In Web3, however, community is more collaborative. Members don’t just participate, they share ownership in the collective.

The pieces exist, so what does Web3 actually need to succeed in the social media and content creation space?

Wallet Friction

Think about the last time you navigated to a website in your browser. Did you see all the DNS routing that resulted in your access to that website? Were you privy to the server information about the AWS data center where the website was hosted? The ease with which end-users in the Web2 space can utilize the full capacity of the internet without needing to understand its details has yet to be replicated in Web3. Asking users to sign a transaction for each action they take on a website, and then having to wait for that transaction to settle before their view updates, is a pain point that Web3 continues to struggle with. There are solutions that are close to solving this problem, including account abstraction, embedded wallets, and session keys. Account abstraction and session keys allow users to approve or sign only once, so future actions don’t require a signature. Account abstraction is especially interesting because, instead of using a private key to sign each action, the wallet itself is a smart contract with programmable rules for what gets approved, allowing multiple actions to execute without repeated manual signatures (What is account abstraction and why is it important?). Embedded Wallets, such as those provided by Privy and Dynamic, are also making leaps in the wallet friction space — allowing users to access wallet functionality via authorization flows such as Sign in with Google. The main issue is that all this progress is happening in silos, and we don’t have a clear offering that stitches them together.

2. The Cold Start Problem — Social media is only valuable where your people already are. Web3 platforms need portable social graphs that let your followers follow you across apps. When you create a Threads account, your Instagram followers who also have Threads accounts automatically become your followers on Threads. Similarly, when you create your TikTok account, you have an opportunity to discover your Facebook friends who are also on TikTok. So, current Web2 platforms offer both centralized portability (e.g., Threads and Instagram) and Cross-platform discovery (e.g., TikTok and Facebook). Portability exists on Web3 social networks as well, since their social graphs live on-chain. That means that anyone can read and access your social graph and build an app using that information. For example, this is how Lens and Farcaster operate: they allow dApps to run on top of your profile and connections, which sit at the protocol level (Lens vs. Farcaster: Which Platform Is Leading the DeSoc Race?). This means that your social graph is portable across all dApps on Lens or Farcaster, but the main driver of the cold start problem is porting information from existing Web2 platforms. Due to anonymity and the lack of a centrally stored social graph database, this issue has proven especially challenging. Existing solutions include Cyber Network’s Link3, which allows you to create a personal profile using a crypto wallet and link relevant Web2 social accounts such as X, Discord, and Telegram. However, it doesn’t function like traditional social media with a feed; rather, it's just a place to create a unified Web2 and Web3 social resume that you can share. On the flip side, there’s Mask Network’s offerings, such as NFT Rendering and Encrypted Posts, available directly on your Web2 social media platforms. These solutions are making progress, but there’s still not a strong incentive for users to leave Web2 social media platforms and start fresh, especially if their social graph can’t be easily transferred to the new platform.

3. Monetization That Feels Real — Earning tokens is one thing. Actually using them shouldn’t require extensive crypto knowledge. Every day, creators need to actually understand the value and utility of their tokens, not just watch a wallet balance tick up. In Web2, monetization is straightforward, but profits are highly skewed toward the platform rather than toward creators. YouTube, for example, pays creators 55% of ad revenue on standard videos and only 45% on Shorts (YouTube partner earnings overview). The original TikTok Creator Fund only paid between 2 cents and 4 cents per 1,000 views (How Much Does TikTok Pay Its Creators?). In Web3, creators are the main priority through features such as tipping, NFT sales, and direct subscriptions (Web3 for Creators: How I Stopped Chasing Likes and Started Earning). Although TikTok also has a tipping feature, Web3 platforms like Farcaster make it a far more prominent offering. Still, there is a wide gap between earning cryptocurrency and understanding its value in creators’ everyday expenses, such as its applicability in paying for rent, groceries, and gas.

Farcaster and Lens are among the platforms working to close this gap. Farcaster offers the Warpcast Rewards program, which distributes $25,000+ (100% of revenue) to creator pools each week. Lens allows creators to earn through tipping, token-gated content, and profile NFT sales, while retaining control of their entire social graph (Lens Protocol lets creators issue token-gated content; Complete Guide to Lens Protocol — A decentralized social media network).

It is clear that monetization techniques and incentives exist, but we still need a financial layer that doesn’t require creators to understand gas fees and on-ramp/off-ramp mechanisms to access their earnings. We are missing an interface that lets creators focus on creating content without needing a masterclass to understand the value of their earned tokens or how to maximize revenue.

4. Moderation Without a Middle — Decentralization is both the central feature and the problem. Who removes harmful content when no one owns the platform? This is an issue that Web3 social platforms continue to face. Centralized social media platforms like Meta have moderators that actively review content being posted on the platform and can swiftly remove content that violates their terms. However, in a decentralized system, there isn’t yet an entity that can delete harmful content as efficiently as centralized social media moderation.

Current approaches in Web3 include decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) administering the moderation, as DAO members can vote on platform policies (The Future of Social Media in Web3: Decentralized Networks and User-Owned Content). Platforms such as memo.cash rely on user-level moderation, where platform users mute other users whose content they don’t want to see (Understanding and Improving Content Moderation in Web3 Platforms). Lens Protocol launched CultivatorDAO, the first Web3 social DAO for decentralized content moderation. It helps determine which accounts are spam or verified, as cultivators receive proposals for adding accounts to either list or methodologies for adding accounts to either list. Then, the DAO votes on these proposals. Additionally, CultivatorDAO is optional, allowing end-users to choose whether to enable its moderation for their feed (A new era for open, decentralized content moderation in Web3). Farcaster, on the other hand, uses a reputation-based system that determines a user’s trustworthiness. Based on the user’s activity, they receive higher rewards and visibility on the platform (Exploring Farcaster: Warpcast). It also requires a $5 registration fee for users on the platform — meant to deter bots and other spam accounts from joining.

There still isn’t a perfect solution to decentralized moderation. If using a DAO-based solution, how do we decide the power distribution within the DAO and who gets a vote on which content should stay or be removed? Then there’s the issue of permanence. Content posted on a blockchain is inherently permanent because transactions on a blockchain are irreversible. As a result, platforms can hide harmful content from users but can’t erase it entirely. Lastly, AI-powered moderation tools pose their own challenges. Some illicit or inappropriate content can be filtered out by scanning for keywords or phrases. However, what counts as harmful is highly subjective and context-dependent, differing from user to user. Automated systems will struggle to be sensitive to relevant context and to each user’s specific perspectives when determining whether content should be filtered. Ideally, platforms should implement protocol-level slashing mechanisms, where bad actors lose staked tokens for harmful behavior, to prevent bots and malicious actors from posting consistently, governance systems that enable DAOs to effectively manage moderation at scale, and application-level muting features tailored to users. Most importantly, we need to find a way to prevent harmful content from being stored on-chain. This will prevent users from opening up another client to access harmful data that was blocked on their original client. That said, this is where Web3’s core values tension with safety. Censorship resistance is a feature, but it also means a genuinely harmful post lives forever on-chain and remains accessible through any client. This is definitely a key principle to consider as we think about how moderation will work in this space.

The decentralized social media landscape is vast, with many impressive platforms already in existence and being iterated on. I am excited to see the innovative ways in which the space will continue to grow. I’m not sure anyone (myself included) has all the answers yet. But I believe that the fact that we are asking these questions means that decentralized social media is maturing and that new developments are on the way. All views in this article are my own, and I’m open to feedback, changes, or suggestions!

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