To the web3 movement, Facebook and Twitter have become the go-to examples of what needs to be reinvented. BlueSky, Mastodon, Lens Protocol are born out of a longing for openness and sovereignty.
We were approached by the Tezos Foundation to explore building a social protocol using NFTs and blockchain that’s 1) as easy to use as Instagram, 2) uses social signups and 3) as simple to sell or trade with as Etsy. This required some heavy technical work, coupled with creating intuitive designs.
Tezos Social supports social sign ups, and has a social timeline of video, audio, image and text posts with comments and reactions. It works just like the best social platforms.
Our team has been exploring decentralized social apps since 2016, so we’re familiar with ActivityPub, Scuttlebutt, BlueSky and Nostr. They are good technologies, but they are complicated to adopt. It’s yet another standard, with no clear added value to users. Using them does not create network effects– it splits the communities you need to bootstrap from. We realized the solution isn’t in designing protocols, but focusing on how ownership of your social graphs and content is handled.
This led us to NFTs: at their core, they are containers for images, videos, posts that creators and collectors already know how to share. We could build on already existing content and social graphs, and focus on making it dead simple. This way, we’re including existing communities of collectors and artists, and removing existing frictions.
While building on top of IPFS, NFTs and wallets was the right technical solution, the UX of requiring a user to create a wallet, acquiring tokens on an exchange then signing interactions was a no-go. This required us to create completely new standards.
Read more about how we developed Smart Wallets (account abstraction) and our own Social Rollup to find the right UX.
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