Inspired by @rayyamartino’s tweet requesting content about “glimpses into the future of social media”, I’ve decided to start documenting some of my thoughts about what the future of social media might look like. If any of this is interesting to you, send me a message, and let’s talk about it!

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TLDR; the end-game for a decentralized social media protocol should be a hyperstructure. If not, we have room for improvement and should continue working on this challenge.

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Defining the challenge

Currently, I’m really interested in Zora’s definition of a hyperstructure. They define it as:

“Crypto protocols that can run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption or intermediaries.”

More specifically, something can be considered a hyperstructure if it is:

• Unstoppable: the protocol cannot be stopped by anyone. It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.
• Free: there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.
• Valuable: accrues value which is accessible and exitable by the owners.
• Expansive: there are built-in incentives for participants in the protocol.
• Permissionless: universally accessible and censorship resistant. Builders and users cannot be deplatformed.
• Positive sum: it creates a win-win environment for participants to utilize the same infrastrastructure.
• Credibly neutral: the protocol is user-agnostic.

I think this way of thinking is inherently relevant to thinking towards an “end-game” - or final state of a system. Specifically, I think that any endgame for social media results in a protocol that is by these formal definitions a hyperstructure (perhaps with the large caveat that it may not necessarily exist on a blockchain as formally defined, but rather a distributed ledger technology or p2p system). If it is not sufficiently addressing any of these categories, I currently think existing systems could be used in a way that result in an improvement on the existing “web2” social media platforms available, but should not be considered an end-game or truly decentralized social media protocol.

I believe we should spend our time and resources attempting to build social media hyperstructures that will live hundreds (maybe even thousands) of years beyond its inventors.

In addition to the requirements outlined by Zora for a hyperstructure, I think that there are notably unique things when considering social media protocols - for one single example (out of many), it needs to have the ability for certain levels of censorship enforcement - which many may consider contradictory to its requirements of being permissionless and credibly neutral, but I think we can all agree we do need systems that are “user censored” and effectively opt-in censorship schemas to ensure you’re not seeing content you genuinely don’t want to. This juxtaposition highlights some of the key difficulties in building a social media hyperstrucuture, and why a sufficiently viable one does not yet exist.

The formal definitions of these requirements (e.g. what really is decentralized social media?) seem to be unclearly defined and this seems like one of the first steps the community could take if attempting to seriously consider what this may look like. I think this is worth spending a lot of time on to get right, and may result in another part of this blog series.

Existing work

With this all being said, there are a number of projects taking this challenge seriously, such as Bluesky, or Lens Protocol. Generally I think that Bluesky is taking the correct approach and treating decentralized social media as a research problem that is potentially a few years away - since there are potentially damaging repercussions from shipping something too early in this context, both in terms of user data/privacy, and generally a negative impression on the consumer market that could limit further adoption when an end-game is in-play. Lens on the other hand is effectively building a giant “social map” of ERC-721 NFTs issued on Polygon. I think that Lens’ solution is insufficient when it comes to privacy, and scalability, as it’s fundamentally limited by the blockspace available on Polygon, which is a challenge of a different scale when considering how many social media interactions (and thus NFTs) there are within platforms of sufficient scale. Tangentially, the technical challenges are aligned with tbl’s vision of Solid and the semantic web (this youtube video is worth a watch). There is also some overlap with the decentralized web nodes project that Block is working on for it’s TBDex (now named web5 in a seeming attempt to make fun of “web3” proponents? It’s unclear why they chose that name… but it’s Jack Dorsey so… anyways…). Perhaps I can outline some of my thoughts regarding the overlap in approach between bluesky, lens, solid, and block’s decentralized web nodes in a subsequent blog post.

Thanks for reading. If you have any suggestions or feedback, send me a dm on twitter.