A&T View: An article on the decentralized social protocols Nostr, ActivityPub, Farcaster and Lens Protocol

What kind of decentralized social networking does Web3 expect?

Author: Chuan Lin , AnT Capital

Cover: Photo by Tyler van der Hoeven on Unsplash

Introduction

Decentralized social networking has always been a big narrative at the application layer. The current mainstream four decentralized protocols: Nostr, ActivityPub, Farcaster, Lens Protocol. What are their design ideas and principles, and which user groups do they attract? What ecological niches will different protocols be in in the competition? In this article, the author will try to answer this question:

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1. When we study decentralized social protocols, what do we need to focus on? Web2 social products have been criticized for many points: "centralized censorship", "data islands, data intercommunication between platforms", "users lack data sovereignty"... Decentralized social protocols hope to be able to separate from social products" The concept of "protocol layer" uses a decentralized network to realize user information communication and storage of various contents. Different decentralized protocol designers have different understandings of the characteristics of ideal social products, which also brings different protocol design methods and different user groups. When studying the specific design of a decentralized protocol, we need to focus on:

• How do users create accounts and communicate ?

Taking Twitter as an example, the user's account information registration and tweet publishing are all handled by Twitter's centralized server cluster, which is why Twitter can delete users' accounts and block posted content. So, if a protocol does not introduce the role of a centralized server, how can it accomplish these things? Regarding communication, two core scenarios are mainly considered: publishing public Posts and private messages between users.

• Where does the user's social relationship and content data exist ?

Taking WeChat as an example, the user's friend relationship, avatar user name and other data are all stored in the WeChat server. Although WeChat also has an API for third parties to call these data, not only the authority of the API is completely in the hands of WeChat, but also the richness of open data is pitifully small. So, if a protocol does not introduce the role of a centralized server, how can it store these data?

• How to conduct content moderation ?

Although most users who have demand for decentralized protocols almost have a negative impression of the word "content review", complete zero content review is also a disaster for social platforms with public information flow: on the one hand, Bots can send a large amount of advertising content, thereby polluting users' public information flow (Spam problem); on the other hand, there are always some content that are generally recognized that should not be publicly disseminated, such as child pornography, terrorism, etc. Zero content moderation will lead to "bad money drives out good money".

• How to design incentive mechanism?

The protocol layer and application layer of Web2 social products are integrated. At present, there is a relatively mature "traffic-advertising" business model in terms of applications, so users can experience the functions of most social products for free. However, for a decentralized social protocol, the service provider is decentralized, and it is difficult to put the "traffic-advertising" business model on the protocol side. So, what are the incentives for these service providers to consume network resources and storage resources to provide stable and continuous services? Do users have to pay for it?

When studying the users and ecological development of a decentralized protocol, we need to focus on:

• How many registered accounts does the protocol currently have, and what is the growth trend? What growth strategy is being used?
• What are the main applications on the protocol?
• What does the core user portrait in the current agreement look like?

2. Detailed explanation of Nostr

Damus, which exploded in early February, was built on top of Nostr. Nostr is not built on any blockchain, and the core concept of its design is "resistance to censorship".

2.1 How Nostr is implemented: Answers to four key questions

• In Nostr, how do users create accounts and communicate?

When each user uses any application (such as Damus) on the Nostr protocol for the first time, a "public-private key pair" will be created; the public key is the ID displayed by the user to the outside world, and the public key can be shared to let others find you; The private key is the user's "login password". With the private key, the same identity can be logged in on different applications.

In any application of the Nostr protocol, users will be connected to multiple relays by default. If user A publishes a post, it actually transmits the post to these relays in parallel; if another user B and A are connected to at least one relay, then he can search for A's public key and choose to receive A's Post.

Similarly, as long as A and B are connected to at least one Relay, they can search each other and send private messages to each other. When A sends a private message to B, A's public key signature is required so that Relay can identify that the message is sent by A; A can choose to encrypt the message with B's public key, so that only B can see the content of the message.

Users can add or delete the Relay they want to connect at any time (as shown in the figure below). Most Relays are free, and a few Relays that offer additional services require a paid subscription. The payment is made through the Bitcoin Lightning Network, and the mechanism is designed by Relay itself.

Nostr's Relay and Relay cannot communicate with each other.

• In Nostr, where do users' data and social relationships exist?

Stored in all relays connected by the user. Users can export it and store it by themselves.

In fact, the most basic responsibility of Relay is only to forward user information, and has no obligation to store user data. However, each Relay can design its own user data storage strategy (what type of data to store and how long to store). For free Relay, generally a storage period is set; and if a Relay can provide longer-term or even permanent data storage services, then it can attract more users to pay for subscriptions, thereby achieving profitability.

This design leads to a potential problem: if a user's activity data expires on all connected relays, it is permanently lost. This will cause user A to not see his own complete timeline when he switches devices or re-logs in the app, including other users who cannot see A's complete timeline. In fact, in a sense, this may not be a problem, but a manifestation of Nostr's design idea: users should "pay for value", and if they really want long-term data storage services, they have to pay a certain fee.

In addition, in some Nostr applications (such as Iris), users can export their own data at any point in time, back it up and store it by themselves, and restore it when necessary in the future. This is actually a good example of users controlling their own social data — unlike Farcaster and Lens Protocol , which specialize in building social data storage networks later on, application developers in Nostr cannot obtain data without the user logging in with a private key. All the data of a user can be obtained, which also provides potential imagination space for users to commercialize their social data.

• How is the content review mechanism designed in Nostr?

Each Relay designs its own content review mechanism. Relay is not obliged to conduct content review, and most free Relays will forward the information they receive as required. But the consequence of this is that the user's "global information flow" is often full of advertisements and spam, and some content that is generally recognized as inappropriate to appear on social networks (child pornography, terrorism) will also be publicly disseminated. Therefore, if a Relay establishes a reasonable and effective content review mechanism, it can bring a healthy global information flow to users, thereby attracting users to pay for subscriptions.

• What are the incentives for relay operators in Nostr?

The operating cost of the basic Relay is extremely low; Relay operators can provide advanced services (data storage, video transmission, content review mechanisms, etc.)

Since the basic responsibility of Relay is only to forward user information, a Relay can be run with the performance of a personal computer; as mentioned above, if the services provided by Relay consume more network bandwidth and storage space, then it can choose Let users pay for subscriptions.

2.2 Summary of Nostr's ecological development status

According to the statistics of Nostr.Band, the number of Nostr users with user information has reached 780,000, and the DAU has reached 60,000-70,000 (about 6,000 high-value users DAU). It can be observed that the number of users before February 1st was less than 200,000, and the explosion of Damus brought a large number of new users to Nostr. Dozens of applications have been built on Nostr, see Nostr's GitHub for details. Here is a list of representatives as follows:

• Damus is the most well-known mobile app in the Nostr ecosystem and a representative of Twitter-like products. A similar product is Iris, which mainly provides a Twitter-like client on the web.
• Anigma.io is an alternative to Telegram. Users can create public channels that anyone can join and chat with; users can also send private, end-to-end encrypted messages to other users
• Nvote is an alternative to Reddit. Users can post and vote on those posts
• The Nostr protocol can also be used for the development of simple multiplayer games, such as Jeste is a chess platform

However, currently most of the products on Nostr are demo prototypes, and there are many functions that need to be polished and improved. This may be related to the simple design of the Nostr protocol itself, as well as the idea that the founders do not have self-operated applications—many social protocols like Farcaster and Lens Protocol will have at least one core application self-operated by the project party in the early stage. 0 to 1 data record. For example, when Damus was launched, pictures and videos could only be transmitted by URL, and it did not support the withdrawal of any social operations (including posting and likes), let alone the realization of various other functions in Twitter. From the perspective of product experience, there is still a lot of room for improvement in Nostr series products. The core user group of Nostr is very interesting. The author observed for a long time and found that in addition to early adopters and a large number of advertising robots, Nostr’s current core users mainly come from Bitcoin enthusiast communities in various countries, especially Bitcoin’s largest activists . This could be due to several reasons:

• Nostr is a rare protocol that uses the Bitcoin Lightning Network as the core payment method , which objectively promotes the popularity of the Bitcoin Lightning Network. The explosion of Damus has made it one of the few "out-of-the-circle" projects in the Bitcoin Lightning Network ecosystem.
• The public-private key pair, the cognitive operation threshold of the Bitcoin Lightning Network, and the immaturity of the current products limit the spread of Nostr to Web3 users ( here, the definition of "Web3 users": understand blockchain technology, users willing to experience). Yet Bitcoin maximalists are skeptical of the value of any blockchain other than Bitcoin, including Ethereum . With the evolution of the Web3 narrative, the differences between them and other Web3 users are also increasing, which makes them often dislike the views expressed by other Web3 users even on platforms with relatively concentrated Web3 users (such as Twitter), and They debate. Therefore, they are motivated to gather on a new social platform where Bitcoin narratives dominate, and Nostr is the best choice right now.
• Nostr's protocol design concept has many similarities with Bitcoin, concise and clear, and strong anti-fragility. This is also why Bitcoin enthusiasts have a good opinion of it.

3. Detailed implementation of ActivityPub

Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022 is a big event in the Internet field. After the acquisition of Twitter, Twitter's management has clearly become Musk's "one word": the content review mechanism is stricter, and the commercial orientation is more serious. Many disgruntled users migrated to Mastodon, which has a UX very similar to Twitter, but is more decentralized . This is not the first time this has happened. Whenever a Web2 social platform further tightens its content review mechanism, it will bring many new users to Mastodon. The protocol behind Mastodon is ActivityPub. ActivityPub is one of the representatives of "Federal Social Protocol". To some extent, what it does is to "decentralize" the company server in Twitter. Let's take a look at its specific implementation:

3.1 How ActivityPub is implemented: Answers to four key questions

• In ActivityPub, how do users create accounts and communicate?

There is a role named Instance (instance) in ActivityPub, which can be simply understood as "server" .

**The user registers his own account in an Instance designated by himself; when a user A wants to send information, it first sends to the Instance registered by himself, and then the Instance is responsible for communicating with other Instances. **There is a set of communication protocol between Instance and Instance, which is used to transmit and read information between each other, so that users B, C, and D can receive the information sent by user A.

It can also be seen from here that, in fact, the role of Instance is very similar to that of a centralized server of a single project party, except that it is composed of a federated network. If there is only one Instance in the network, then this is not much different from the architecture of Web2 social products .

• In ActivityPub, where are the user's data and social relationships?

It exists in the Instance where the user connects. Users can export it and store it by themselves.

For user data, the idea of ActivityPub is " You can kill me, but I am everywhere ": even if your Instance is inaccessible for various reasons, you can create other new users on any Instance, and import previous friends and Blog post information without losing it.

The fly in the ointment is that if an Instance blocks the user, or goes down for various reasons, and the user does not export his own data in advance, the user's account and data will be lost. In addition, if the Instance itself has become malicious to the user, the user will not be able to show their own data. From the perspective of data sovereignty, Mastodon seems to be in an intermediate state - users theoretically own their own data and can export it, but the server still has the "power of life and death".

• In ActivityPub, how is the content review mechanism designed?

Each Instance designs its own content review mechanism .

Viewed individually, each Instance can ban the user's account and block the user's content; however, if the user is dissatisfied, he can also migrate his account to other Instances. In this way, the decentralization of content review is achieved.

• In ActivityPub , what is the incentive for the Instance runner?

This is a potential big problem with ActivityPub: most Instances do not have any income from users, and rely on community donations to run , and even many Instances are built with personal interests to "generate love"; although theoretically Instances can be created through Mechanisms such as advertising and paid registration are profitable, but these mechanisms are not effective given the fact that there are a large number of free Instances.

This also caused many Instances built by individual enthusiasts to stop running after a period of time. If it does not notify the above users in advance and the user does not export the data in advance, these users will lose their accounts.

3.2 Overview of the Status Quo of ActivityPub Ecological Development

The biggest advantage of ActivityPub is that the product application on it is very mature, and the UX is very friendly to Web2 users, which can attract a large number of Web2 users who simply dislike centralized censorship. **Especially those users who like to express their politically inclined opinions and create highly politically sensitive content, they hate content review on the Web2 platform.

Taking Mastodon as an example, Web2 users can get started directly without learning too many additional concepts (such as public and private keys, Seed Phrase, and blockchain); most of the functions implemented by Twitter have been implemented by Mastodon.

Mastodon has amassed nearly 3 million users. Among them, the top three example sites have 60% of the number of users and 45% of the number of posts. Among the three major instances, except Mastodon.social, which is officially operated, the other two instances are from Japan. Japanese users accounted for nearly 40% of the total number of users, followed by the United States (20%) and France (10%). (Data source: Bonfire Union LP 2022 Social Protocol Overview Report)

4. Detailed implementation of Farcaster

Farcaster is a decentralized social protocol project founded by former Coinbase vice president executive Dan Romero. It completed a $30 million financing led by A16Z in July last year, and has received a lot of attention and expectations. Let's take a look at Farcaster's design philosophy:

4.1 How Farcaster Implemented: Answers to Four Key Questions

There is a new concept of "Hub" in Farcaster . In a broad sense, it plays a role similar to the Server server with Nostr's Relay and ActivityPub's Instance, but in fact they do different things .

As shown in the figure, Farcaster has a three-layer architecture: the bottom layer is the Ethereum blockchain, which is used to store user registration information; above this is a network composed of Hubs, which is used to synchronize the data of all users on the entire network in real time ;Each application can be regarded as a Client, which communicates with the Hub network and transmits user operations.

• How do users create accounts and communicate in Farcaster?

First of all, when the user registers on the application side, a new Ethereum address will be automatically generated, and the user needs to keep his Seed Phrase; after the user chooses a unique username, the binding information of this "address-username" will be registered in the Ethereum In the Farcaster contract of Fangzhuan, it is used in the entire Farcaster protocol. In essence, Farcaster's user ID core is the same public-private key pair as Nostr, but it binds more information (username), so it needs an on-chain contract as a registry; while the ID of the Nostr protocol only has public-private keys Yes, users only need to hold a private key to log in with their own identity, which also means that users can have different usernames on different application platforms .

Then , the user will send information to a Hub through the application (Client), and the Hubs will broadcast and synchronize the user data of the entire network in real time through the data structure of Delta Graph. When the Hub where other users are located receives the broadcast, it will update this information synchronously and feed it back to the application connected to it .

It can be seen that if you only look at Farcaster's L2 and L3, the information dissemination process has many similarities with ActivityPub. The biggest difference is that there is no need for real-time synchronization of user data storage between Instances of ActivityPub, but between Hubs of Farcaster .

• In Farcaster, where do users' data and social relationships exist?

User IDs are stored on Ethereum, and other content data and social relationships are stored in each Hub (or in the Hub network) .

If you only look at this storage solution, you will feel that it is actually similar to the concept of blockchain "distributed ledger"; but considering the performance of the existing public chain, the storage of social data is not directly placed in the Lens Protocol . On the chain, it is placed on the decentralized storage network designed specifically .

Compared with Nostr and ActivityPub, when there are enough Hubs participating in the network, the data storage of this solution is undoubtedly more stable and reliable . However, this also means that developers can easily obtain all social data of users.

• How is the content review mechanism designed in Farcaster?

The solution is not yet clear; it may be left to each application to develop its own review mechanism .

In the short term, Farcaster adopts a strict growth strategy of the founder invitation system to ensure the quality and tonality of initial users. So Farcaster won't have to worry about that for quite some time.

In the long run, founder Dan said that the review authority may be handed over to applications, and each application will design its own review mechanism and related standards.

• What are the incentives for Hub operators in Farcaster?

In the short term, it is driven by low cost and community enthusiasts; in the long term, it is based on agreement income .

Farcaster may open a charging model after the number of users reaches a certain scale. Users need to pay a certain amount of fees every month to continue using the account, and this part will be distributed to the operators of the Hub as agreement revenue.

It can also be seen from the design of Farcaster that the Hub of Farcaster will have a higher storage cost due to the need to synchronize the data of the entire network, which may lead to too few Hubs in operation and make the network more centralized. The team believes that ideally there should be around 100 Hubs in the network.

The following figure is the Farcaster team's estimate of the protocol's user growth and related data storage costs:

The team believes that the storage cost of the Hub will be low (about $3500/year) until the end of 2024, so in the short term, it will not affect the enthusiasm of some community enthusiasts to participate in building the Hub. After 2024, on the one hand, it is necessary to give the Hub operator agreement income as an incentive, and on the other hand, it is also possible to improve storage efficiency through technologies such as sharding.

4.2 Development Status of Farcaster Application

Farcaster currently has about 8k users, maintaining a weekly growth rate of 5%. Its core user groups are mainly Web3 dollar VC circles and developers . Although these users are Web3 practitioners, they usually focus more on their own work and thinking and analysis of Web3. The frequency of interactive operations on the chain is not necessarily high, and there is no high demand and expectation for token AirDrop.

The 5% growth rate of Farcaster is designed by the agreement project party - users must send an application to the founder of Twitter private message before they can be invited (this is what the author did). This is a "hunger marketing" method, which can ensure the quality of early users, thereby improving the community atmosphere and project quality, which is very similar to Zhihu's early growth strategy.

For the list of Farcaster ecological projects, please refer to Farcaster's Github.

Warpcast is the most important project of Farcaster at present. It not only has more complete product functions, but also has some functions specially designed for Web3 users - for example, you can choose to connect your account with your usual Ethereum address, so that your friends can See your recent NFT transactions and mint history.

At present, most of Farcaster's other ecological projects are replicas of Web2 social projects or "re-integration" of users' social data. For example, Searchcaster allows you to search for keywords from Farcaster data, and Discover allows you to browse popular information in Farcaster without logging in.

5. Detailed explanation of Lens Protocol

Lens Protocol is an on-chain social protocol project founded by Stani Kulechov, the founder and CEO of AAVE . It is currently the best ecological development and the most users among similar projects.

5.1 How Lens Protocol is implemented

To some extent, the implementation of Lens Protocol is the easiest to understand - because almost all operations and data are on the chain.

• In Lens Protocol , how do users create accounts and communicate?

Users cast their own Profile NFT in the Lens contract. This NFT will be displayed in the form of a domain name suffixed with ".lens". It is the user's account and the only identity controlled by the user.

When a user publishes a Post, the content will be stored on the blockchain synchronously . The application only needs to read the data on the chain, and then it can disseminate information to other users.

Compared with other protocols, since users generally mint NFTs with their commonly used wallets, the tipping mechanism between Lens Protocol users is the most natural and convenient among several protocols , just transfer tokens directly to the other party’s wallet. Users do not need to additionally associate BTC lightning network addresses and ETH addresses like Nostr and Farcaster.

• In the Lens Protocol , where does the user's identity, social relationship, and content data exist?

User social relationships exist on Polygon in the form of various NFTs . Specifically, the establishment of social relationships in Lens is recorded and stored in the form of NFT. For example, if A follows B, a Following NFT that records "A follows B" will be cast.

When a user publishes content, Lens Protocol requires the content index ContentURI to be published on Polygon . However, Lens Protocol has no clear restrictions on where the content pointed to by the content index exists, and it depends on the design of the specific application (similar to the metadata of NFT). Most applications currently store user content on Arweave.

• In Lens Protocol , how is the content review mechanism designed?

Lens Protocol clearly does not censor and filter content at the protocol layer . Each application needs to design its own corresponding algorithm, or use some third-party algorithm modules.

Cultivator DAO, which is officially supported by Lens Protocol , is doing such a content review module. It can be selected by application developers whether to "open"; the strategy of Cultivator DAO is also public, which means that anyone can fork it and make their own strategy.

• In Lens Protocol , what are the incentives for service providers?

Since the Lens Protocol is completely on the Polygon chain, the service providers in the Lens Protocol agreement are actually the nodes of the Polygon , and the Gas fee is their incentive .

For users, all current application operations only require wallet signatures, and no payment is required. Because the current specific uplink operation is handled by the Lens Protocol project party and the Gas is paid on behalf of the project, but this is not a long-term solution: according to the calculation of ETH . The total Gas fee will reach 2.5 million US dollars, which is difficult for the project side to bear.

Therefore, in the long run, with the increase in the number of Lens Protocol users and the increase in activity, if the data upload scheme does not change, it is very likely that users will pay the Gas fee in the future. However, "paying Gas fees for every operation" greatly violates the habits of users in Web2 social applications, resulting in reduced attractiveness and loss of users. Therefore, this issue is the focus of Lens Protocol further iterations .

5.2 Status Quo of Application Development

Lens Protocol now has about 108,000 Profile NFTs, with more than 160,000 user registrations. There was no restriction on the registration of Lens Protocol in the early days, but since November 2022, the project side has changed its growth strategy, and only whitelists users can register (maybe it is related to controlling the scale of Gas fees paid?). Currently Lens Profile can be purchased on Opensea, the floor price is about 120U.

Lens Protocol has nearly 150 ecological application projects, but most of the products are still in a relatively early stage, and the functional experience is relatively simple. The most well-known application project in Lens Protocol is Lenster, a Twitter-like product made by the project party. (For details, please refer to the Lens Protocol research recently released by SevenX & Buidler DAO)

The users attracted by Lens Protocol are mainly "Web3-native" users who are very familiar with on-chain operations, especially those who play NFT . Although Lens Protocol does not have a clear related token mechanism, Lens Protocol ’s token AirDrop expectation may be one of the reasons why many users are willing to take the time to understand, register, and continue to be active. In addition, the tipping mechanism of Lens Protocol is the most natural and convenient among the current protocols, and it also attracts some high-quality Web3 content creators.

Since most operations need to be uploaded to the chain, even if the gas fee has been paid by the protocol, the user still needs to frequently use the wallet to confirm the signature, and there is also a delay in the operation of the chain, so the user experience of the Lens Protocol product is compared to other protocols. It can be said to be the most unfriendly to users, and is subject to Polygon 's architecture and performance .

5.3 Other on-chain social protocols

Lens Protocol is currently the social protocol on the chain with the largest number of users, and its design ideas can also be regarded as a representative of this type of protocol design . However, as mentioned above, the design of Lens Protocol makes the experience of products on it subject to the performance of Polygon , especially the strategy related to data uploading.

The current social protocol on the chain is still in its infancy, and new protocols are constantly emerging, and the various problems encountered in the development of Lens Protocol also provide a good reference for latecomers. For example, CyberConnect, which is often compared with Lens Protocol , although the user's account and social relationship are still on the chain, but its specific protocol design cancels a large number of on-chain operations, and uses some off-chain verification methods to solve it. The design of these new protocols and the development of their ecological applications are also worthy of continuous attention.

6. Summary and Outlook

Taken together, we can see that the design concepts of the four protocols can be divided into two factions:

• The core concept of the design of Nostr and ActivityPub is to "resist centralized censorship". They put more emphasis on the user's control over their own content data, allowing users to export their own data, and did not make an open data storage network for developers to call.
• The core concept of Farcaster and Lens Protocol design is more concerned about an open and interoperable, developer-friendly user data layer to solve the "data island" problem between Web2 social products.

Below, the author will make a comparative summary of the advantages and disadvantages of the four protocols, and make predictions for their future development:

6.1 Activity Hub

ActivityPub appeared earlier, and the above applications are more mature. Both UX and concept are very friendly to Web2 users. It is difficult for other protocols to catch up with the attraction of Web2 users for at least one year.

However, ActivityPub is more like a transitional product in design. User accounts and data are still hosted under a server (Instance). Although backups can be exported at any time, this does not perfectly solve the problem of user data storage reliability; in addition The operator of the server (Instance) also lacks clear incentives.

In the long run, with the popularization of Web3-related concepts, the advantages of ActivityPub in attracting Web2 users will become less and less obvious, and will be replaced by better-designed protocols.

6.2 Nostr

Nostr's protocol design is very lightweight, and the requirements for the responsibilities of the server (Relay) are very simple - only need to help forward information. This makes the cost of Relay very low, and users can easily build Relays belonging to their own projects or interest groups. The entire network is extremely anti-fragile, and there will always be places where there is no content review.

Considering Nostr's public-private key concept and BTC Lightning Network's payment model, the understanding of these concepts and the requirements for user autonomy are highly consistent with Web3 users (blockchain users). Coupled with the immaturity of the current Nostr ecological product functions, it is difficult for Nostr to attract users who are disappointed with Web2 social products like ActivityPub before Web3-related concepts themselves are popularized.

In the field of Web3 (blockchain field), it may not be in an advantageous position in the competition of protocols such as Farcaster and Lens Protocol . As far as the community atmosphere is concerned, if you are not a Bitcoin maximalist, then the in-depth discussion atmosphere of Web3 practitioners in Farcaster and the NFT atmosphere of Lens Protocol may be more suitable for you; in terms of the expectation of token economic incentives, Nostr is definitely not as good as Lens Protocol.

Therefore, it may be quite a long time, Nostr's core user group will remain the status quo: Bitcoin enthusiasts. But this is actually not surprising - because from the perspective of Nostr's Github documentation, its design is highly "concept-driven" rather than "practical-driven"; To build a more durable anti-censorship social protocol, Nostr has not accepted financing (only Jack Dorsey's 14BTC donation), and there is no pressure from capital.

6.3 Farcaster

There are two main highlights of Farcaster:

• As a protocol designed for Web3 users, it is now able to achieve an experience comparable to that of Web2 social products. This is due to its self-built data storage network composed of Hubs.
• Farcaster's conservative community growth strategy is rare in Web3 social networking, which also brings high-value initial users and community atmosphere to Farcaster; this style of play also has successful precedents in Web2, such as Zhihu.

Therefore, judging from the current development situation, if there is any protocol that is most likely to become the Twitter of Web3 users, then Farcaster may be the most promising.

Compared with other protocols, Farcaster started late and has a more complex design, so it is still in the early state of rapid iteration, and there is still more room for improvement in the future.

6.4 Lens Protocol

The data on-chain of Lens Protocol is not only conducive to the combination with other Web3 projects and the development of new gameplay, but also allows the creation of the creator economy by virtue of the reward mechanism of the wallet. However, a large number of wallet signatures, operation delays, and data upload fees that follow are all costs that users need to pay. This is why the author believes that it is difficult for pure Twitter-like products to achieve great success on Lens Protocol .

If there is a hot product on Lens Protocol , it must be closely integrated with various on-chain gameplays, but currently there is no such product in the Lens Protocol ecosystem. With the development of blockchain basic technology, various new and more well-designed on-chain social protocols are also being launched. If Lens Protocol cannot make good use of the first-mover advantage to create explosive products in the Web3 community as soon as possible, Then it may face the crisis of being surpassed by latecomers.

References:

1. Nostr Github: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nostr
2. Farcaster Github: https://github.com/farcasterxyz/protocol
3. Take Lens Protocol as an example, see the data structure of decentralized social applications, and discuss what is a good Dapp data layer: https://mirror.xyz/muran.eth/dy-6ExlpYsehQJJvNcRlLi8XDjwdEw1xoV7oDxy_eWM
4. Buidler DAO x SevenX, Lens Protocol 4D deep research report: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/HISBmicZ-6szM6RY4ZWZyw
5. Social Topics: From Walled Gardens to Civic Squares — An Overview of Social Protocols by Mask_ Bonfire Union: https://docs.qq.com/pdf/DUlNoQ0h0cURRUU5P?&u=ec65a5118acc42e2960e5aa4b12feb42

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