8 Comments

Great read - nice bit of history as well. Did not know about the early success and ultimate demise of OpenSocial, super interesting.

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Thank you Jacques

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An interesting read. I've been following Lens Protocol for some time, and worried about social media's sustainability, as it's a house of cards built on advertisement revenue.

I think the problems going forward will be hosting expenses and platform governance. I am starting to think the Web3 ideal of decentralizing hosting is a pipe-dream, especially with a monolithic social media site. And governance is probably more important, anyways. I am currently working on building an oldschool phpBB forum which uses a mix of blockchain integration and social contracts to rent its governance out to active users to cover its expenses. This would be a proof of concept for allowing web communities to use constitutional democratic republic governance rather than a hard ownership and user barrier.

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Forums are one of the concepts I could not dig deeper into the piece. I believe the internet was originally decentralised with forum based communities. But Reddit & Facebook groups made many of them redundant. Pretty cool what you are building if you can crack the cold-start problem.

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Hello Joel, loved the article. Would it possible to pick your brain sometime over the same article!

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Hey Kaivalya! Thanks a ton. Unfortunately, I'm deep in the next few articles so a call won't be possible but happy to chat over text on Twitter/Telegram if helpful.

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Ahh, unfortunately I'm not on Twitter or Telegram.

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Here's my e-mail if easier! - joel@decentralised.co

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