What would decentralized social media look like that Aave and Twitter want to create?

Author: Richard Lee, Chain Catcher

When the infamous Poly Network attacker spent hours and high transaction fees to communicate with the public through on-chain messages, he proposed turning the Ethereum network into a truly anonymous Twitter or WhatsApp. This idea may be gradually coming to fruition.

For a long time, social media has ceased to be a good space for promoting public dialogue and discussion. The giants of centralized network platforms have complete control over the retention of content, while the risk of user privacy breaches has been widely criticized.

Through decentralized networks, returning privacy data and content censorship rights to users is something many teams have been working on in recent years. In 2016, the decentralized content-sharing platform Steemit was launched on the Steem blockchain network; in July 2020, Block.one launched the decentralized social media application Voice; outside the crypto community, the decentralized social media application Mastodon also once gained popularity, trending on Twitter.

However, these attempts have far from achieved the same level of success as traditional centralized social media. The Steem community has become fragmented, Voice has been shut down and transformed into an NFT creation and trading platform, while Mastodon, which has achieved considerable success with an interface similar to Twitter, currently has over 4.4 million registered users, but its user base and activity level still lag significantly behind Twitter.

Twitter, Aave, and EOS founder BM's team have been racing in this field since the beginning of this year.

As a target of the decentralized social media revolution, Twitter proposed the BlueSky project in 2019 to decentralize the power of the currently highly centralized platform. "Our goal is to become the standard client for the public dialogue layer of the internet," said Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

Recently, Bluesky announced it would operate independently, with early Zcash developer Jay Graber officially appointed as the project leader. Mask Network, Audius, Mastodon, and others have become the first community projects, and overall development progress has noticeably accelerated.

In July this year, Aave's founder also disclosed on Twitter that they are developing a decentralized social media platform and plan to launch their product within the year.

1. Aave's Social Media Strategy

When Aave's founder Stani Kulechov announced on Twitter in July that Aave would establish an Ethereum version of Twitter, it was not just talk.

It is understood that this leading DeFi project is building a decentralized social media protocol running on Ethereum, which will serve as infrastructure—allowing anyone to create social media applications similar to YouTube and Snapchat on this protocol. Meanwhile, the first social application created by the Aave team based on this protocol, a "decentralized version of Twitter," is planned to be launched within this year.

Aave co-founder Jordan Lazaro Gustave is primarily responsible for this initiative. According to The Block, more than half of the Aave team members (about 30 people) are currently dedicated to this project.

The centralized content censorship power of traditional social media and the platform's monopoly on revenue are the reasons triggering Aave to create a new protocol. "Twitter makes all the revenue from the tweets you post and the content you share, and Twitter decides which of your content gets attention through algorithms," Kulechov said in an interview with Decrypt.

According to Kulechov, in Aave's decentralized version of Twitter, users will be able to achieve "content monetization" through cryptocurrency trading features, meaning content can be monetized. At the same time, users will have a unified identity and social graph at the protocol level, ensuring that their followers are not lost when switching between different applications.

Kulechov stated on Twitter that the protocol will "default to monetization" and will not use a social token model. Each registered user will be able to attach their Ethereum wallet. However, Kulechov also told The Block that the project will not issue tokens or achieve "monetization" upon launch.

In terms of data storage, the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) will be the main storage site for content information such as text, audio, and video. Meanwhile, transaction information for the project will be stored on Ethereum, and the protocol will use a roll-up Layer 2 solution to execute transactions on the second layer and periodically batch transaction information back to Ethereum to address issues such as low short-term throughput and high gas fees on the Ethereum mainnet.

However, this also poses privacy breach risks. Anyone can access any information stored on Ethereum or IPFS at the protocol level. Aave's solution to this is that individual social applications can establish their own databases on top of the Aave protocol to store users' personal information and other privacy data, setting access permissions.

Kulechov revealed to The Block that there will be no content censorship mechanism at the protocol level, and social media applications built on the protocol can introduce their own content censorship rules. Additionally, Kulechov encourages the construction of content review protocols that use cryptocurrency as incentives based on the Aave social media protocol, giving users "net positive" motivations, such as reporting fake accounts.

2. Twitter's Bluesky Blueprint

In December 2019, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced the establishment of the Bluesky project, aimed at creating a decentralized open-source social media protocol to provide an open and decentralized standard for social media development. Under this standard, recommendation algorithms and content censorship mechanisms will be controlled by users, rather than by private platform giants like Twitter and Facebook.

Nearly two years after its announcement, Bluesky recently announced the establishment of an independent entity and confirmed the team leader. Yisi, CTO of Mask Network, one of the first community projects announced by Bluesky, told Chain Catcher that the inability to determine the project leader was a major reason for Bluesky's delayed launch.

During this period, Bluesky completed its first task, a 60-page overview document of the existing decentralized social ecosystem. Since February 2020, Bluesky has led a group of 40-50 people to review existing protocols and decentralized social media applications and their respective advantages and disadvantages.

Yisi told Chain Catcher that the group included not only practitioners from decentralized communities but also some inventors of traditional protocols, who researched and discussed the design of existing protocols to prepare for the later true design of Bluesky.

At the beginning of this year, Bluesky released this document. In August, Bluesky announced the establishment of an entity independent of Twitter and announced the selection of the team leader—early Zcash developer Jay Graber.

Jay Graber previously created her own decentralized social media application Happening but ultimately abandoned the project. According to Graber's statement to TechCrunch, the reason was that the project faced obstacles in attracting potentially interested users. The audience traffic that Twitter inherently possesses was a significant reason for Graber's choice to join the Bluesky project.

"The real strength of Twitter's attempt at a decentralized protocol is that if you can design an ideal protocol, you don't have to start from scratch to build a user base because Twitter will bring in a lot of users." Graber stated.

On the other hand, Twitter, as a centralized social media giant, has had its motives for initiating Bluesky questioned. When Jack launched Bluesky in 2019, he mentioned that Twitter hoped to alleviate the pressure it has faced in content moderation by integrating this protocol. However, the official account of the well-known decentralized social media platform Mastodon commented after the Bluesky announcement, stating, "This is an announcement to establish a protocol that Twitter can control, just like Google controls Android."

In response, Jack stated in January this year that Twitter would only act as a funding party for Bluesky and "would not control" it.

Currently, Bluesky is still in the team-building phase, only hiring a senior protocol developer and a front-end developer. The job listing indicates that the protocol developer's responsibilities include gathering requirements, designing solutions, and "researching and contributing to existing protocols and standards."

Whether the Bluesky protocol will incorporate blockchain or cryptocurrency is a key focus of attention. According to Yisi's observations, many people in the Bluesky discussion group are resistant to blockchain and cryptocurrency, but Yisi also stated that the community "has never rejected blockchain," and it will also depend on the opinions of Jay Graber and Jack.

It is well known that Jack himself is a fervent Bitcoin enthusiast, and when he announced the plan in 2019, he explicitly mentioned blockchain: "The emergence of new technologies makes decentralized approaches more feasible, and blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and persistent hosting, governance, and even monetization."

Jay Graber has systematically summarized this, stating in a Medium blog in early 2020: "Storing volatile and ephemeral data (such as user posts) on the blockchain is an improper use of a globally distributed ledger, but using blockchain to manage identity may be a good direction." Additionally, she mentioned that certain potentially controversial and difficult-to-track functions, such as "like" counts, could also be placed on the blockchain in a fully P2P network.

After completing the team formation, Bluesky will enter the "mechanism design" phase. Whether the aforementioned views will be realized in the final launched protocol remains unknown.

In terms of specific protocol design, Yisi revealed to Chain Catcher that identity and social graph will be one of the initial focuses of Bluesky's research and experimentation. Furthermore, Jay Graber stated in an interview with TechCrunch that how to achieve better, non-monolithic content moderation is also a key concern for Bluesky.

Recently, Bluesky announced its first batch of community projects, including the decentralized social network Mastodon, manyver.se, Planetary, Iris, the encrypted chat tool Element, the peer-to-peer browser BeakerBrowser, the video conferencing tool Meething, the video playback tool Watchit, the music streaming platform Audius, and the Web 3.0 privacy and data protection project Mask Network.

Yisi told Chain Catcher that in the short term, this batch of projects has no substantial cooperation with Bluesky and currently only serves as a showcase to help interested users experience existing products and services, providing an intuitive impression of decentralized networks. However, Yisi also stated that in the future, after Bluesky releases the test version of the protocol, projects like Mask Network are willing to try to connect to this network.

3. Concerns about "Content Monetization": Is the Pursuit Dialogue or Attention Economy?

Aave and Twitter have opened a protocol competition. One major difference between the two is that the Aave protocol is based on the Ethereum ecosystem, seemingly targeting crypto enthusiasts, while Bluesky may leverage Twitter's advantages to seek a broader mainstream user base.

Another distinction is that based on the information currently disclosed by Stani Kulechov, Aave seems more inclined to establish a decentralized social media network that is more "friendly to the attention economy."

On one hand, Kulechov repeatedly emphasizes the advantages of the Aave protocol over centralized media platforms, highlighting the unified identity and consistent social graph at the protocol level, allowing users to "own" their audience, and content monetization will not be limited to a single platform. On the other hand, Kulechov also revealed in an interview, "Ultimately, every creator can allow their followers to vote on the types of content they publish through a DAO." This move may delegate the choice of content production to the audience.

It is unclear whether Bluesky has any "monetization" plans, but its leader Jay Graber has expressed skepticism about this in a Medium blog. She believes that content monetization will make user behavior significantly driven by monetary incentives, becoming unnatural. "Ideally, money should be a facilitator, not a driver of interaction." She said.

Steemit may be a typical failure case of "content monetization" in social media. According to Steemit's rules, users who create posts with high voting rates can receive rewards from a reward pool, but voting power is measured by reputation, which accumulates based on the age of the website registration. Therefore, early users of Steemit have greater voting power, monopolizing the rights to filter and incentivize content.

Currently, Steemit and its forked community HiveBlog have largely become tools for making money, filled with mediocre and repetitive content. For example, a common piece of information, "People who sit for 8 hours a day are 7 times more likely to have a stroke than others," received high votes on Steemit and ranked on the homepage.

Last year, Steemit founder Daniel Larimer also announced the launch of a new decentralized social media plan called Clarion. To learn from the previous lessons of Steemit and Voice, Clarion will not introduce a blockchain network but may adopt a P2P protocol, striving for an ideal level of decentralization and censorship resistance.

4. Do Users Need a Unified Identity and Social Relationships?

In the future decentralized social media network, whether we will maintain a unique identity and unified social relationships across different social applications is also worth paying attention to.

The Aave team clearly states that users will have a unified identity and social graph at the protocol level, but whether users have the right to refuse this feature when using specific applications remains unknown.

"Owning one's audience" is the empowerment of content creators by the social media protocol. However, not everyone is a KOL, and needs may be diverse.

In Yisi's view, identity in the cyber-digital world should not only be unique but should be determined by the user's own will. "Because we (in real life) also have social identities and social relationships, I am the same me in front of you, and I am another person in front of my family." Yisi stated that the so-called "identity" is actually personality, "We should allow such different personalities to emerge on decentralized social media."

Yisi also revealed that during discussions about account creation and identity in the Bluesky discussion group, most people agreed on the idea of giving users the choice—allowing users to decide whether to enjoy or refuse the social graph. However, whether this idea has become a definitive principle for the Bluesky team in protocol design remains unknown.

Shortly after the establishment of the Bluesky entity on August 19, Aave founder Stani Kulechov posted a picture of a purple sky on Twitter, tagging Twitter and Jack, and saying, "The sky is purple." (Note: Aave logo color is purple, Bluesky logo color is blue)

Will the "sky" be purple, blue, or another color? We shall wait and see.