Isn’t it quite ironic that in over ten years of blockchain technology being around, we’re still heavily reliant on web2 technologies? Show us a single web3 project that doesn’t use Twitter to share announcements or an NFT project that doesn’t host their community on Discord.
Of course, there are good reasons to use these tools. The audience is large, and the platforms are intuitive (ok, except for discord). Everyone and their grandma a can figure out how to use Facebook. When Elon bought Twitter, some hoped things would improve. Unfortunately, anyone who’s recently been rugged on a Twitter space or retweeted by an army of bots will be able to confirm that systemic issues due to centrilsation are as present as ever.
TL;DR
- While Polygon has Lens Protocol and Ethereum has Mirror—on NEAR, a team of devs is quietly building out NEAR social, a crucial part of enabling the user-owned Open Web.
- Existing Web2 social media platforms (like Twitter) have a single point of failure, raise privacy concerns and don’t allow users to own their data, which is monetized. On the other hand, decentralised social networks like near.social aim to provide solutions for these problems through peer-to-peer networks for social interactions, content creation and distribution.
- In essence, NEAR Social offers a new platform for innovation, with widgets that can be combined, forked and created by anyone. Users own their data and developers can easily access public data to create their own apps. near.social has over 1400 registered profiles and is a space that brings together the brightest minds in the NEAR ecosystem.
What’s wrong with web2 social media?
Here is one of the biggest problems with current social: even though users create data, the data isn’t owned by them. Users’ data is monetised by selling it to advertisers. Moreover, developers who want to build using such data will need to negotiate with corporations and get API access if they are lucky — albeit within a limited capacity.
Beyond that, there is a whole array of privacy concerns with centralised social networks. Their single point of failure is an issue: When Meta’s servers go down, so does service for everyone. And if this data is to be breached, then millions of users are affected.
Fortunately, web3 is starting to spearhead viable alternatives to these platforms.
A Decentralised Social
Broadly speaking, decentralised social networks (DeSo) are peer-to-peer networks for social interactions, content creation, and distribution. They enable users to protect their privacy while enhancing data security through decentralised storage. By doing so, decentralized social media aims to protect users from exploits and malicious use of their data: when every transaction is on-chain, it becomes a lot harder to try and sell user data to advertisers. DeSo platforms are also censorship-resistant and open to anyone. Users won’t have to fear being banned or de-platformed by accident, as seems to often happen these days.
While Polygon has Lens Protocol and Ethereum has Mirror, on NEAR, a team of devs is quietly building out NEAR social, a crucial part of enabling the user-owned Open Web.
A bit of background on NEAR social
NEAR social didn’t start natively on NEAR. Its first iteration lived on Mastodon, an open-source software for running self-hosted social media sites. People could use their near wallets to connect and interact with each other. However, Evgeny and the team driving NEAR social quickly realized that this wasn’t a long-term solution as it still had a single point of failure and was not censorship-resistant.
From creating a database to host social interactions (SocialDB), the project eventually evolved into an open space for people in the NEAR ecosystem to explore an open-source, decentralized alternative to Twitter.
Getting into NEAR social
On NEAR social users own their data, and developers can easily tap into the power of accessible public data to create their own apps. This enhances network effects as better data leads to better algorithms and, eventually, a better experience for everyone involved.
Widgets
When you go to the NEAR social site, pretty much everything you see is a widget. Widgets are open-source software components that can be combined, forked, and created by anyone with some coding knowledge. Widgets are prettty similar lego blocks, waiting to be turned into whatever you want them to be. An added benefit is that they can be updated and improved without recompiling all dependent widgets — making the process faster and saving computation.
NEAR social already has all the widgets necessary to offer an experience similar to Twitter, where you can create and customize your own profile, follow others, chat and create polls. They can be small things like a simple button or the entire home screen of the NEAR social app.
Other available widgets / applications include an event planner, polls, Astro DAO’s bounties, a tool to keep track of new years’ resolutions, the pagoda console, a meme generator, and a tool to mint your own social avatars and use them as your pfp.
Funnily enough, at the moment a popular thing to do on NEAR social is poking. Each poke requires a transaction, so the more poking, the higher the transaction volume on NEAR.
NEAR Social’s Impact on the NEAR Ecosystem
The vision behind NEAR social is to build the foundation for an open web where people have real identities that go beyond just being a wallet. It’s already bringing together builders in the NEAR community and has over 1400 registered profiles.
However, NEAR social is a lot more than just a social network. It’s also a layer for innovation where developers can go wild with their ideas. As the Ready Layer One team has demonstrated with their idea of adding push notifications; it took them less than a day to have a first beta running.
A Glimpse into the Future
NEAR Social is a space that brings together the brightest minds in the NEAR ecosystem. It enables anyone to try their idea on a small scale and provides dApps ways to explore how they can integrate with DeSo.
For instance, DEXs like REF are building their own widgets to enable direct swapping for users. And near.social is not limited to NEAR dApps either — anyone can connect widgets to external ecosystems. This means that NEAR social can easily turn into the go-to entry and access point for web3 as a whole.
With the recent launch of the mintbase affiliate links, NEAR social could even turn into a more web3 native place to discover new NFTs while giving those who shared the NFT an incentive to curate.
As more and more devs get on NEAR social, the platform will improve and users will be able to find more ways to customize their interface. The barrier for someone with zero coding knowledge to do more than a few simple changes is still high — but it won’t remain this way. The more people build widgets and interfaces, the easier it’ll be to choose templates you like. There might even be drag-and-drop editors and no-code tools to empower everyone to build their own social experience.
Since its beginnings as a social database, NEAR social has come a long way. It’s definitely exciting to witness the progress it’s made in just a few months, adding social features and new widgets. So if you’re a dev, give it a shot and create a simple widget. And for those of us with less JS knowledge, set up your account and start poking back.
For more on the vision and background story of the NEAR social development, you can also check out the recent Twitter Space we held with Evgeny, the leading dev behind near.social.
Who knows, maybe we will soon be having NEAR Spaces instead?
Written by @NEAR_intern
Edited by @achildhoodhero
NEAR Social: Building The Foundation of the Open Web was originally published in NEAR Protocol on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.