The Crumbling of the Ivory Towers

Or why it’s worth trying decentralized socials

“In an information industry, the cost of monopoly must not be measured in dollars alone, but also in its effect on the economy of ideas and images, the restraint of which can ultimately amount to censorship.”  - Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants. 

Chances are you’ve found this article while browsing through X. It’s every crypto person’s favorite pastime. This endless scroll shows us anything from the latest memecoin rug to VC hot takes and, occasionally, comedy gold. 

Mingled within are ads that tend to be completely irrelevant to what you care about. I, for example, am constantly getting gaming ads, although I have not even touched my Steam account in over a year nor played games outside of chasing yield. Even as an Elon Fan boi, you’ll have to admit, the experience has gotten worse, from not seeing content from people you follow to a stream of misinformation with a pinch of more questionable takes in community notes. 

The problem is that even as crypto users, we are somewhat hostage to X because where else could we go? If suddenly, X started to ask us all to pay for use of the service, we’d probably do it—and countless companies have opted to pay for premium instead of quitting the platform, hoping it’d at least aid their reach. 

The process we’re witnessing of platforms providing people with value to ones that extract from them is one that Cory Doctorow has dubbed “enshittification.” Instead of explaining in length what it means, here are a few suggestions on what you can do to feel it: 

• Try finding a product on Amazon where the first page isn’t full of ads
• Do a Google Search 
• Try to see a tweet from someone on your X timeline you actually follow. 

For the super courageous, go to Facebook, which turned from a place where we poked friends to a place where tinfoil hat aficionados get triggered by AI-bot-supplied rage bait. It’s worse than the dead internet; it’s the Zombie Internet. Social connections? No mas. 

Then the question becomes, why don’t we just opt out? This is the point where we have to realize that these platforms have a monopoly, which they’ve managed to sustain thanks to linguistic acrobatics. If you are trying to grow your professional network, where do you go outside of LinkedIn? 

At first, these social networks were actually useful. Remember the early days of Facebook (if you are old enough, then you might want to join the Zoomers in crypto telegram group)? The timeline was simple, full of your friend's stupid takes. That was the stage where there was actual value provided to end-users. Then things shifted, as Facebook realized there was much money to be made from businesses by selling them ads and giving them advanced targeting capabilities. The platform has gone entirely unhinged, squeezing both companies and users. 

Look at any platform that reached a big scale in recent years, and you will see the pattern repeat. Potato patata. Even TikTok already displays the dynamics, and that’s the youngest among them. Not even the CCP can fix this. Technology beats ideology. 

But maybe crypto can provide an alternative. 

Let’s quickly recap what’s bad about the current state before exploring why crypto is the messiah (or isn’t). 

• Privacy is non-existent, although, to be fair, we’re primarily willing participants in our own panopticon so it’s not clear how much we shall blame that Google knows what we ate for breakfast on them. 
• Data ownership is impossible when all the data we generate miraculously belongs to and is mined by the platforms to show us ads (aka monetizing attention) 
• Algorithms shape culture, yet decisions are opaque and made by a handful of mostly tech bros in Silicon Valley Ivory Towers. 
• No Freedom to exit: you exit, you lose all your connections. The current social media platforms are closed black boxes, offering limited access to their data and infrastructure. 
• Misinformation and censorship 
• Monopoly powers : every time a competitor grew too large, the Big platforms simply bought them up. There’s no incentive to innovate or improve when the current system works. Businesses have to use these Social Media because that’s where their users are. 

“We are all mine sites now, data mine sites, and despite the intimacy and import of what is being mined, the mining process remains utterly obscure and the mine operators wholly unaccountable.”  - Naomi Klein in Doppelganger.

The one comfort is that at least if we’re to believe Cory Doctorow, the current state of these platforms will lead to their death. 

Ok, but if X really died (this is purely hypothetical anyway), where would we go from there? There are different answers to that. Maybe just go live in a hut in the woods, reconnecting with Nature. 

Alternatively, there are social networks that try to rid themselves of some of the problems with Big Tech by distributing power and giving users more control. 

Social networks, but decentralized 

People in crypto weren’t the first to notice the issues with how big social networks operated. Already in 2009, researchers developed an alternative to the likes of Facebook, a fully peer-to-peer architecture that was called PeerSon. It never took off, but the efforts continued. 

Nowadays, Mastodon is probably one of the more successful examples of a network that isn’t controlled centrally. By providing interoperable code deployed across websites, it allows developers to create their own servers—called instances—which they can operate, own, and moderate as they desire. 

And then there is Bluesky, the pet project of the previous Twitter CEO, now turned Bitcoin Hippie Jack Dorsey. Currently, Bluesky has 6 million users, of which 1.3 million are active at least once a month. Unlike Twitter, it’s built on an open-source framework, giving anyone outside the company insights into what’s happening. 

Sounds already pretty crypto-aligned, right? 

Decentralized socials like Lens and Farcaster take things even further. These networks prioritize user autonomy and censorship resistance and provide resilience against single points of failure. They aren’t based on email addresses but operate on top of crypto rails, with users relying on their wallets and public key encryption for sign-ups. 

Lens currently has around 30,000 interacting users, and Farcaster counts a total of 621,000 users, but only 10% of those are daily active users. 

Compared to Bluesky, one can’t help but think: 

Sure, but a bigger number isn’t always better, or is it? 

At least, you can tell yourself you’re still early. 

Even though technically, we’re not because decentralized social networks that use crypto have been tried various times before, as with Steemit. They just never took off. 

Maybe now is the time. At least in theory, DeSo sounds great as it: 

• Offers enhanced resilience 
• Enables users to take their data and leave 
• It tends to be open-source, enabling suggestions and improvements 
• Provides increased censorship-resistance 
• Integrates native crypto payments
• Empower developers to build on its distribution 

And there aren’t a whole lot of other significant internet use cases beyond commerce, finance, and social, so we might as well give it a try. What’s the alternative anyway? 

Be a willing contributor to your own (data) exploitation without any guarantee that your account will still be available the next day?

But the reasons to at least try DeSo aren’t just that the current centralized platforms aren’t serving us well; there’s also an opportunity to shape how we envision social experiences—making social platforms actually social again. 

On using DeSo 

As the author of this post, my primary exposure has been to Farcaster, even though I got my hands on a Lens handle way earlier than an FID. So, these thoughts are somewhat subjective, although they illustrate some bigger challenges and opportunities for these platforms. 

While architecturally different, both Lens Protocol and Farcaster aim to provide an ad-free social experience where users get to choose how they interact. The underlying protocol aggregates all the important data, such as follows, likes, and posts, while anyone communicating on top does so through a client of their choice. 

The good 

Open Playground 

This creates an open playing field for developers to build on, with countless dApps built in and around Lens and Farcaster’s social stats. On Farcaster, for example, there has been a rise of “mint your profile and trade it on a bonding curve” dApps. Not that this fosters mass adoption, but at least it’s the type of experimentation where, eventually, someone comes across a mechanism people actually want to engage with long-term. 

Choose your algo 

Another benefit of having a social protocol is that one can design a client with a different algorithm. Currently, the main client on Farcaster is Warpcast, built by Merkle - the company that developed the protocol. However, not everyone is happy with the way content is aggregated to the main feed by some way of prioritization. 

Instead of just complaining to DWR, the founder, a handful of devs have chosen to simply build their own client that has a reverse chronological feed.

Vibes

This is extra subjective. Still, it would seem that at least the more toxic X gets, the more people can be enticed to try another social network simply based on Vibes. Lens and Farcaster were initially running on an invite-only base, allowing them to curate a fairly cohesive group that created its own subculture, where “rules” were loosely enforced through community and a /dont-do-this channel. 

I didn’t start using Lens frequently because when I signed up, there was mostly talk about NFTs, and I wasn’t all that into those despite holding quite a few. On Farcaster, however, the existence of channels (theme-specific feeds similar to sub-reds in Reddit) provided a place to nerd out about non-crypto topics and look at fun memes, all while staying on top of what’s happening in EVM land. 

It also created a way to connect with people over your niche interest. I ended up joining a boardgame meetup, discussing great books, receiving countless postcards from fellow casters, and being “promoted” to co-host of the classical music channel. 

These are more wholesome interactions than are often possible in a crowded, opaque place like X. But not everything is rainbows and unicorns on DeSo. 

The challenges

Insiders and Outsiders 

For now, there seems to be a sentiment on Twitter that people on Farcaster are their own in-crowd and should stop telling everyone to join their platform. This happens with every new platform, and it’s somewhat logical that people who joined early have accumulated a higher reputation than those who just joined. With a little effort, anyone can find their crowd. 

There’s no guarantee that either of the current DeSo will survive, but you might still make frens along the way or learn a thing or two.

Bots 

The Degen Airdrop was a watershed moment for Farcaster, making some early users a little rich while attracting a whole new audience of airdrop farmers to the platform. The rise of the bots began, and even though one has to pay storage fees, the infestation seems unstoppable. While users can report suspected bots, chances are whoever supplies them will always be winning that race. 

Spam & Freedom of Speech

Bots often bring the next nuisance to platforms: spam. Warpcast has a filtering mechanism that hides replies that are most likely from spammers, yet this will likely be a challenge for every social network, decentralized and not, for the unforeseeable future. 

While freedom of speech is often touted as the one thing that’ll fix all of social media, as we’ve seen with X, when you take guardrails of it, a lot of weird stuff finds its way on the timeline, from blatant lies to sparkling conspiracy, all sort of non-reliable content fills the feed. 

Just allowing everyone to post everything is one thing. Freedom of speech is a noble goal, yet what’s often forgotten is that it should not mean being free of accountability or consequences. The ideal state for social protocols will likely be permissionless on the protocol level and filtering/moderating on the client level. 

How that’ll be achieved in a decentralized ecosystem remains to be seen. Facebook spends around $3.7 billion on content moderation, more than X revenue - and still, the feed is not one you’d want to browse. Moderators frequently quit due to gruesome working conditions and PTSD. 

Solving censorship by allowing everyone to post anything is only one part of the equation. In my view, creating a place where real humans want to spend time will require consistent effort in moderating what they see while balancing that with not throwing them too deep into their own filter bubbles. 

"What if the powerful can use information abundance to find new ways of stifling you, flipping the ideals of freedom of speech to crush dissent, while always leaving enough anonymity to be able to claim deniability?"  - Peter Pomerantsev in This is not Propaganda

Even with those challenges unsolved for now, it’s worth spending some time on decentralized social networks. Try them out, and who knows, maybe you enjoy them more than you expected. 

Just like any social platform, they give rise to their own insider jokes, memes, and movements. The noise-to-signal ratio is still significantly better on the DeSo, also because they are still small. 

For now. 

And if the one topic or movement you want to see in the world isn’t there yet, why not go and create it? Instead of chasing big numbers, the way to get the most out of a social network is to chase quality connections and conversations. Unlike blockchains, human relationships don’t scale. 

"It seems that in a world where people compete with numbers, it is the numbers that always win" - Ronan Hession in Leonard and Hungry Paul 

SQD also has a channel on Farcaster, so feel free to drop by to share feedback, memes, or questions. 

Obviously, in a world where all social experience is powered through onchain data, we expect SQD to play a significant role, with our CEO frequently alluding to the possibility of having customized feeds powered by local indexing on a user’s device. 

If there is any DeSo data you’d like to access using SQD, get in touch.