People who paid attention to BitClout last year might have heard of its successor, DeSo, a specialized blockchain for social media applications that is now making waves in Web3. DeSo has been operational for over a year and now has a significant ecosystem of social media apps. While most blockchains are designed for economic and financial use cases, DeSo is designed purely for social uses by providing a decentralized communication layer for Web3 geared towards social media.
It is now well known that social media companies use algorithms to promote/demote content, while collecting their users’ private data to resell to third-party advertisers. Worse still, all social media profiles and user posts exist inside private servers and can be deleted at any time. Therefore, content creators do not “own” the content they create and have limited monetization options. Many creators face the looming threat of de-platforming, demonetization, and the algorithm”shadow banishmentof their content. These centralized social media problems could be solved by blockchain technology, but public blockchains like Ethereum, Solana or Polygon are too expensive to use because their blockchain gas fees are too high to store social media data on the chain .
DeSo aims to be the solution to these problems. According to DeSo’s official website, DeSo is a blockchain designed specifically for social media applications. It seeks to provide a new way to create, own and monetize social media content by providing a “social stratumfor Web3. All messages and user profiles are stored directly on the DeSo blockchain and can be viewed by any application built on it, making DeSo content “portable”. Portability of content is one defining qualities of DeSo, as all messages are stored on the blockchain, not on private servers, and can be uploaded to any app built on DeSo and monetized in any way the owner chooses (NFT) with their DeSo profile and can create and sell “social tokens” that distribute revenue from NFT sales, features that are used on DeSo’s popular Twitter-like Diamond app.
DeSo is the social layer of Web3
DeSo is not a smart contract blockchain like Ethereum. Instead, it’s designed to store large amounts of social media graph data and user profiles, which would be prohibitively expensive on any other network. For example, a 200 character tweet might cost $50 on Ethereum, but on DeSo it costs less than $0.000017. In addition, The block reported on DeSo’s recent integration with the popular Metamask crypto wallet, which provides Metamask users with a fully encrypted on-chain messaging service on the DeSo blockchain, as well as a set of Twitter-like features. This expands the Metamask crypto wallet to include a wallet-to-wallet crypto messaging application and enables gasless DeSo profile user creation, publishing and tracking. With plans to later integrate Solana’s Phantom Wallet, DeSo intends to be the blockchain-based social layer of the Web3 Internet, operating across all blockchains and platforms agnostically.
Through DeSo, users can leave comments on NFTs that will be visible on all NFT marketplaces on all blockchains, which could be invaluable in preventing the sale of counterfeit NFTs, and could be adapted for Web3 e-commerce in the future. The ability to send a message to a user’s crypto wallet has been missing in Web3 for many years, with some notable entries that never caught on, but DeSo’s integration with Metamask finally fixes this missing utility. With DeSo, Web3 is no longer limited to sending magic money over the Internet and buying expensive JPEG NFTs. It now provides social and communication utilities which are all fully decentralized and controlled by their creators, not the social media companies.
While many users will remain on Web2 social media platforms, many users and content creators are tired of tiptoeing”The algorithmand are open to new ideas for monetizing content. DeSo’s content portability is a game-changer for content creators. DeSo is a solid example of what blockchain technology can do that goes beyond just economic technology, as it aims to become the layer on which all social communications and activities live.
Sources: DeSo, Diamond, The Block, Metamask, Phantom