Stani Kulechov: Lens Protocol – Decentralised Social Media Primitive #512

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the Technologies projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution I'm Frederica Anson I'm here with my hair Roy today we're speaking with stani who is the founder of other companies the company the company unsurprisingly behind Ava um which you covered a while back and also social network lens which we will speak about today sunny welcome back thanks thanks for having me here again Frederick this is uh it's always great to be here cool we had you um on not so long ago um then we spoke about Abba V3 very tangentially we I think we mentioned lens

um but today we're here to kind of make up for that shortcoming so sunny in a nutshell what is lens tell us about the origin story um and uh what it set out to do I remember something very vaguely about you applying to be kind of the the Twitter CEO yeah that was uh becoming a self-claim uh Twitter a CEO while while there was a big chaos going on everywhere um obviously that was a joke but somehow people really thought about that that's actually happening which I couldn't imagine being a CEO of Twitter um but yeah that was fun and lens itself is a set of smart contracts and tools that allow you to build web tree social

applications or make your up your application vet resocial and what it means that you can create things like um web tree powered handles profiles ability to collect content as well and make content available in the future so something that's missing now in um all this kind of like an internet social applications is that these platforms are run by businesses um you know and they can go down at some point and we we the people we create a lot of these internet artifacts and and if these platforms are going down we lose all those interesting

culturally relevant artifacts that we trade online so in in a nutshell it's basically a set of different tools that solve different challenges um owning your audience having the ownership for that um having ability to store your content in a decentralized storage um and other kind of uh other uh Primitives we we call so it doesn't solve one particular uh challenge that someone might have or want to use the pre-social but actually solves multiple of those uh things and it really depends of what developers are building so what of those Primitives they actually want

to use to solve their problem so it can be as simple as adding a collect button into your blog post you know by lens or adding profiles or a follow graph to your existing web Tree application or even traditional application okay kind of I see why um there are some aspects of social networks um where you feel uncomfortable with them being owned by companies so tell us how lens function so he said it's a set of smart contracts but kind of who's written those smart contracts are they upgradable who has admin rights so who do they effectively belong to someone

yeah it's a good question so obviously at this stage lens protocol um I mean we hit a couple of months ago a milestone um of uh being one year on online actually so we've been building for two years now uh one year live and still beta so basically um we're launching a V2 which is an improvement of what we had a first vision of what lens could actually be and bringing more flexibility into what could be built in terms of the smart contract itself there's different things that actually provide uh immutability for example the ownership of your profile so that always belongs to you but certain features are still under

upgradability and mainly because it's very early um there is kind of like a soft governance at this point so we introduced uh two months ago um Libs short for uh lens Improvement proposals and they're there for actually soft polling for the developer community and in overall the lens Community how the protocol could be evolved different kinds of improvements that could be made um but it's part of the whole process of progressively decentralizing as the protocol gets more uh mature um in what ownership actually means is I want to pinpoint that is

um we have this concept about uh crypto in general that once you have your keys um you own the assets that are on on that key so we simply extend that idea not only covering let's say your crypto assets but also the profile that you're using ongoing basis to um communicate with other people and establish connections over uh lens protocol or wherever you are integrating lens standing is it correct to view lens as a developer platform for social media applications meanings meaning that lens itself is not

thinking of the sort of end user interface or the end user format in which content might be delivered but rather it's it seats to be one layer below where it provides a lot of Primitives through which people could build or not Twitter like clone or or any any clone essentially of a social media application or an entirely new social media application yeah I mean in the beginning what we wanted to establish are a very early Vision was that um we have quite a good conviction of let's say uh what social media Builders need uh to build

um and what could be built on on with lens actually in the very beginning that there was a lot of discussion for the past couple of years about the existing platforms and um the lack of user ownership things like for example owning your handle or owning the relationships that you create with with your audience for example from Creator perspective or any user perspective um and also the the idea that how we can avoid for example censoring and certain uh scenarios so how we can build more Equitable social media networking Behavior so in that sense kind of uh we noticed

that a lot of the applications were tuning into rhythm-based content so if you look at the currency the lens ecosystem most of the applications are heavily relying on uh for then text you also have some applications that are focusing also um on audio and video but they really are trying to solve existing kind of um applications and making them just more web free uh powered and I think that's fine um but for what it what it what we think it's exciting is um a fee candle with lens enable the new experiences so what is because of lens it's more easier to build website social

meaning that as a developer or social media founder you don't need to focus necessarily on rebuilding a network but you could actually tap into a shared network or have the flexibility to also create a new network if if that's what you see as valuable so the way I like to come compare lens uh protocol and and the vision is similar to um something like ethereum and many of the protocols in D5 or maybe on the underlying networks where you provide infrastructure for uh and design space for developers creators and everyone to innovate and the more you have that

design space you will see that Innovation coming so we basically have taken a couple of steps forward and trying to guide and and think what kind of things could be build a lens and today we have taken like 180 degrees back and thinking like how we can actually be less involved and how we actually can create more space for developers to build those new experiences and make the protocol less and less opinionated and more and more open and that's for example some of the features that are coming in in the US V2 actually opens a new Surface for composibility so lens protocol lens Publications talking to or interacting

with the other protocols build on the same network I like to take the analogy of lens protocol being an ethereum like substrate on which lots of different social media applications can flower a little bit further so I was at Art in crypto in the TDM white paper came out uh is in 2030 and to me like white addicts metallics genius was he saw a lot of different things that people were trying to build like Master coin counterparty quarter party wasn't there yet

mastercoin was the main thing colored coins and master coin and other applications that people were imagining and he was able to come up with a primitive gas consuming virtual machine the ethereum moisturrency during complete gas consuming virtual machine DTM virtual machine as a technical solution saying if we had this primitive all of these application developers would be enabled at once so you had to build just one thing and it would enable a huge diverse group of Developers

when I hear about lens you know about your vision it's almost like my skeptical mind says I don't think there is something like a during complete virtual machine equivalent for social media that if I pretty discriminative it's going to satisfy a wide range of social media application developers in my mind it feels every social media application developers need each then be quite different quite heterogeneous and one primitive at the infrastructure level or two Primitives at the infrastructure level won't be able to diverse needs so convince me otherwise that actually something like that it's

possible yeah that's actually um quite fascinating because that's exactly where we've come along so we started in a way where we're thinking that you know each and every social media application has this particular set of features or behavior so we basically can offer this as a protocol and something that we learned quite even even just by building and developing and getting feedback from different Developers and watching the the user behavior and and how these applications are built is that this social media landscape is is very wide and offering uh a kind of like

a protocol wide solution is always going to be quite difficult because it comes as a package and what we notice is that certain social media applications in most cases they might have a similar feature so they might have for example profiles follow drafts but then when you go to text-based Applications then you have Publications and publication might have some features as well and then a bunch of other things that that might different so and that's the beauty of social so the the more wider the space is the more Innovation we we can see and what we

realized is that offering more of like a package protocol is actually quite difficult and and what actually works better is that we basically slice up the protocol and all the Primitives that we have so the things how we humans behave um socially so what are those things that we do uh not only on internet but outside of the internet how do we form social capital or let's say relationships how do we produce content how do we distribute content as well and putting those into separate categories and offering them as Primitives and and the key here is that a developer can actually choose what you

need from that primitive stack that is web tree powered because some of the elements of your Social application doesn't need to be on the blockchain or doesn't need to require data availability but some do depending on what is the use case and I think that's the kind of like um uh important thing there so so we have to figure out the existing Primitives and I think we we kind of know them we kind of see that you know here is the different primitive stats social media applications are using but I think there is even like a bigger area to learn of what we can actually do with web tree because we're for example

using the blockchain the ability to create digital scarcity or using the timestamp machine and how do we kind of create New Primitives and I think that's the most exciting part of my work where uh we're looking kind of like more in the future and trying things out and and seeing what are these Primitives that could actually be very empowering for Builders to create new new applications can you walk us through these Primitives so I mean the obvious kind of the obvious first example would kind of be like a trust graph yes and that's kind of the thing that probably definitely should be on chain if anything's going to be on chain and then kind of walk us

through the other things that kind of you have identified as social Primitives I think the trust graph were social graph is is a excellent example so one of one interesting idea about the truss graph for example is that you normally when you build a social media application you you use a database and you usually have your user base and those users aren't publicly visible who are the users right but when you're using uh web3 powered social graph that user base is actually public um and what's interesting there is that you can tap into that public and shared user graph as well

and for for example that if you create a a new experience and you want to get everyone on lens to to use it it's quite simple to to enable a sign in with lens meaning that you log into that application and if you have a lens profile you can as a as a builder you can invite those uh users so that mitigates the idea of cold start uh problem and then there's kind of a layers of of social graph and also layers of Interest graphs so you could look into the blockchain and see that okay what are people doing there uh what are the social behavior or

ownership factors that could actually be beneficial for my use case and we can invite someone who has a lens profile but also have a specific categories of nfts as well because that might flap the interest that you have on chain verified data and to use your application so I find this part of social graph fascinating because it brings A New Concept for for users for Builders especially that are haven't used to a shared graph or like a public social graph then there is a concept of profiles and in V1 you have a handle in a profile that are combined together so each

profile has a handle but on V2 they're separated so there's a profile nft that gives access to your profile and a handle and after that is basically a handle and you can use also a ens handle if if you already own that so handles are a way of identify who you as a user are and signal that out but a profile is a fast genetic primitive because profiles can follow each other meaning that you can for relationships and on chain meaning that you can actually create an audience and once you have that audience you can add programmability so for example let's say we have a user that has 100 000

followers so you can actually share content and amplify content to your own user base and you can monetize that amplification as well so a creator for example can share content of favorite Brands and also get automatically monetized so I would say that one of the key um even like I would not even say A Primitive but maybe like a wider building function is that you you have with website programmability but also the the built-in monetization as well and then there is more that three native kind of uh Primitives like collects so if you want to add a collect pattern

into your blog post um or you want to make your piece of content whether that's music or audio or video um a tokenized asset and and make it memorable and collectible you can still do that as well and with V2 obviously there's uh plenty of features but the idea of open actions um it basically opens up to create any kind of a primitive to work with lens protocol so you could create a post that appears in your followers feed and it describes a a dial for example you recently joined and you can ask other people to join the same

dial and instead of seeing a like button or a collect button you might see a join down button instead and that happens completely on chain so so based basically what's fascinating here is that these Primitives they don't need to work in Silo but they can actually work together with other protocols and Primitives that are already built and designed uh in in web 3 on the same network or cross chain with oracles is feed generation something that you think of in of a primitive so basically when when I think of Twitter which is kind of the the main social network that I use and you kind of you have two views to kind of see your feed right the for

you so basically where it's kind of um somehow where posts are somehow prioritized but you don't know how and then basically the thing that just shows you everything in order and both of them are kind of crappy so kind of I think uh to at least for me I would actually be willing to kind of pay for more diversity in um feed generation is this something that could be implemented on top of lens yeah so obviously this is something that's the can be solved with the application Level or Services layer um there is one application that is it's an open source uh front-end for for the lens protocol which is lenser

um it's it's built in a in a hackathon in two weeks but progressively has become kind of a place to see Integrations between lens and other website Primitives and something interesting is that there's a company called karma tree labs and they're actually doing algorithms and those algorithms are available on on the lenser feed and I'm pretty sure um all the other applications there implementing their own algorithms or you will start seeing actually service providers coming and building those algorithms similar to to the um Karma tree labs and what is fascinating is that you can just select an algorithm

and and basically based on that you you will see the content so what is mind-blowing here is that normally as a internet user you know you're always forced into some particular experience and this is also related not to social media but pretty much anything that is on internet um and obviously D5 changed that a bit because you can move your liquidity easily exchange your experience to something else but when it comes to social being able to actually use third-party algorithms seems kind of a cool idea and gives the user choice so in some ways I think even those algorithms are in in some ways

Primitives or or some sort of components that are built on top that could be reusable as well or they can be even private but the biggest difference here is that because the way lens is built um the user has a choice so you you can make that availability for user to choose what algorithms you want to use and if that experience isn't satisfying the user can go to another application where there is that more better experience so we've kind of talked about things that should be on chain um I am sure there's many many parts that are kind of by default off chain and can you talk about those

and how they are handled I think that's what we have one com one kind of like a layer between on chain so just to give an example how the on chain part works is that um you can transact on chains so you can um you can collect for example content as in a tease that will be a on-chain transaction but the actual content is reflected to a decentralized storage or data availability layer like RB for ipfs and then if you don't want to do an on-chain transaction which is most of the cases so if you have a you know funny comment that you want to add to your post but you don't see the value of actually tokenizing that

um and make it more memorable you could actually use a service we created which is called momoka so momoka basically allows to take content and create it and submit it into Data availability layers and what it means is that when we think about blockchain the way it's built today it has execution it has a state and and data availability and what's in some cases you need for content is only the data availability but you don't need necessarily like the execution part so you just want to ensure that the content is stored as a internet artifact for longer period of time it's it's something we don't think about often but like let's say if if a

popular blogging platform goes down today what happens to all the artifacts that we all created that are very important today uh for us so you can use data availability transactions and then the off-chain piece usually something that is built on an application Level layer So currently there are likes what you can build for example uh privacy private posts um and and all the things that you actually don't need on channel infrastructure and the programmability and and that verification that it brings and it really depends on the use case what we talked earlier so um if you're building a publication application maybe you use some of these

Primitives like let's say profiles handles then you're using momoka transactions to store the content maybe you add a collect Button as well to to later being able to to to bring that content on chain as well if you want the users to do so but it really depends on on the exact use case and that's why building up three social is very different from anything else I've built before because you really have to bring that optionality for the builders and they essentially choose from what they actually want to use to to success to succeed in their use case but I'm curious about in technical

architecture is is there a tragedy of the commons problem in web 3 social what I mean is like what I mean is this so so we have like some let's say we have some Primitives and some kind of social graph on a blockchain and then there is a data availability solution which I think in lenses case is that is an L3 where I think that data can be published and anyone can come and build a user interface to to all of one of this data and as figurike mentioned have basically their own curation algorithms um decide what to show to a user and

attract users and there's a competition between user interfaces to attract users and hopefully that goes in a direction where morator users are satisfied when I imagine this interaction as a builder of an UI let's say like okay I start a company with two co-founders we're going to build a UI on top of all I imagine myself in the beginning bending like code curation put algorithms to Fritter data well but as soon as kind of like the first level succeeds my incentive is to have some feature in which there is locking for the users for example if the users

want to do a direct message to each other and that direct messaging system may not Naturally Fit a blockchain my incentive is to build like a private data messaging private DM layer in my user interface and have users message each other in my private DM system so that those users then get locked in into my my user interface as opposed to other people's user interfaces so in a sense my selfish incentive is to break interoperability ship that incremental feature which is not shared

or the public graph because it is by having that extra intimatal private feature that I lock users onto my user interface and develop a business model by I don't know selling attention or something like that and um so in a sense and if you imagine me as like one developer and there are 10 developers they have the rest of the incentive race behaves like that then actually none of us in the end are incentivized to bury the public good which is like this public data Lake us of social data so when you another analogy you can take off it is there's

this famous go third pasture or the tragedy of the commons problem which is I have my set of quotes and other people and other quoted as a set of goats maybe there's 10 of us there's public pasture where the goats can go increase but we want to do limited grazing on the public pasture because if you do too much grazing that the grass dies out the pasture becomes useless but my selfish incentive is to Grace as much as possible because sort of that's my optimal strategy And when everybody follows their optimal strategy well nobody maintains the public pasture

so do you think there's a problem like that for for social media where the UI Benders incentives will always go towards these private features and your data Lake will in the end end up becoming a weak data I love that you're already thinking of building something or less um but uh I I do think that's uh it's it's a very very fascinating topic to to to think about because it really isn't only like kind of like a a talking point on the pre-social because well obviously I I think that's end of the day it really depends on what

kind of network effects there exists right so so effectively for uh new application Builders they might want to go with a let's say public uh shared social graph and and get the value out of there and then build a dealt on top because I personally think that the aspect of decentralization should exist where you create guarantees for the users or for the developers on some sort of objective so for example like I will be very fine if less protocol is decentralized but let's say there's maybe five of um API services that are making sense of all

the data and brings to the users um or or applications as long as there is that end point where you can always revert that hey you know I own uh my profile and you know we have a risk of the system not working and and and that's kind of like a removal of the route he is where the decentralization comes in and for when you think about like new builders for some might actually be that um they want their own graph so they look at the the kind of like a public graph and try to make sense of it and and think that this is good but what we are aiming for we want to do it uh in a different way we want to create

completely separate graph for example and maybe not making it um shareable and that's fine because I do think there should be a a public good layer that exists and then there should be incentive for that but there's also should be incentives to building even layers that might be more private but they have the use case as long as there's that functional public good layer that um that works so the same question comes in also in regarding let's say uh ethereum why people choose to build on ethereum today for example why they don't just go and build on a completely new network

that empowers on the tele users and a more simple argument now is that you know you can always build your layer 2 where we saw recently with makerdale for example looking at Solana's code base and thinking of um using that to to build their own uh Network and and and there's a question like okay why like we have kind of like a similar Challenge and then Lido is another example where you know there's a discussions where uh there's discussions of thinking of how these validators uh staking for validators could actually self-limit themselves and I think these limitations um

really isn't servicing because I I think that if a centralization is a challenge uh we have to innovate in a way where there's enough competition to to to build towards in other words for example when we go back to the question of the shared social graph um the the value there is obviously uh the data what you could do with the data and and the user base so this is the reason why for example a new developer wants to build on let's say ethereum um even if the gas cost is a bit higher because let's say there's certain amount of users a network effect based on those users we can quantify what are their

data so what kind of Holdings they are what kind of behavior and that creates Network effects so in some ways I think what might happen um regardless of flight plans and um regarding even like ethereum and and similar situations is that you will see traction of people coming and building on the same graph and that just empowers the draft and and obviously makes it better so there's an there's incentives as long as the graph grows but there's also incentives to to build something uh separate and let's uh shareable as well and they might have those two different use cases and I do

believe for example like a public draft shareable works pretty well when you're building applications that are kind of like a public town squares where you can use that public data public discussions um you want to have data availability there but then you might want to create an application that is some sort of members of uh I don't know for people who have kids uh you know and you have some sort of verification process there and you know you want to build on a separate drive so that's possible uh too so I think that problem exists everywhere but I think something that really is tied to that is that like liquidity in the data or whatever data

is like what it did but basically that's why that's the reason why for example people choose to build on lands or build an overall build or material uh as well when gas boss might be cheaper somewhere else so I do think the problem exists everywhere and it's some sort of far balancing aspect of of incentives that actually get people to to build I hope that's a that's a that's a answer that makes sense yeah yeah definitely so I'm actually curious what what the technical architecture looks like for these kind of public goods parts of the lens protocol and then the extension of the question

would be okay if I wanted to build sort of a private code which is a private DM or a group group chat private group chat how would people build on top of it what what's the tech port on technical architectural their inline system yeah I mean the the protocol itself is is public good so basically we'll design you will decide what elements you want to use from lens so for example maybe the only thing you care about is handles and profiles and then you basically build the database uh on top for private messages and then you have encryption as well and that's actually good example of a

um good a free social application because webpage social uh it doesn't need to be webtree social from Head to Toes I mean in terms of like every single thing we have to solve with some sort of decentralization aspect because decentralization comes with with a cost and where there's a cost there has to be some sort of other incentive value to do that handles make sense because you can trade handles uh profiles as well because you can secure an audience maybe some of them become Brands and um they can be also tradable and you can also share Revenue split uh revenue between different applications between different

users as well so I think like we will see in the future very simple technical products built on lens or with lens where you use maybe like one or two Primitives you even use a lens SDK so you don't interact with the much of of actual smartphone check code base but to a nsdk and then you add the things that you don't need the website part and the experience and and that's about it I I think it's fascinating because um in most of the interesting things that you can do with social media applications you have to do it very fast so you want to build something in a month or two and whatever you build necessarily won't last long so we probably will see applications getting a

lot of lot of user acquisition but then you have very low retention and I think that's okay I mean a social application might become like um something compared compared to seeing let's say movies or other type of content where you know you do it once or twice or maybe three times and that's it and we've seen this on also outside of web3 social so for example threads achieved 100 million side of sign ups very quickly because they did it on a shared network within their own platform and went down to 10 to 8 million and and still um is decreasing so we do see this kind of like a a challenge and it's just a new way of building I think in in this

space and and maybe that eight or tenth application that you build and experience that might have a better uh retention curve in and actually start having more stickiness but if lens can make that process uh 10 times easier and and reactive ending already users that are on board and their friends I think then we're in a in a very nice part how many people have profiles on lens today has 420 000 profiles it's really not a big kpi for us because the access is still in beta so anyone who wants a profile you know you can shoot me

um should be a um DM for example or Twitter and I can let you in especially if you're looking to build something and then down the line I think profiles is isn't really uh the the best way to measure even when we're in a permission State um because the actual the actual usage depends on the use cases so I think it goes to the application Level I think we will measure more of some sort of monetization and how it empowers the the the the actual uh developers as well and maybe even the users I think and that might be our approach so we still are working with the ideas of like what we

actually should follow uh because it's very early yeah absolutely so I mean one of the reasons why you're in beta and you kind of need an invite to join us um that uh your costs per active user are actually pretty high I I read somewhere that it's around 400 US dollars per year and I think kind of the monetization that we scratch it like a couple of times now that's kind of one of the parts that can address that so how do you see this um develop in the future they did it so the interesting way is that users always when they interact with the blockchain obviously there is gas fees if the network is on layer twos or let's say something like polygon um those costs are much lower and the

way we actually did they use the the way we built the experience um across all the lens ecosystem is that as a user you don't really sign for transactions um and you don't pay for transactions so they're sponsored transactions uh on a layer two for example the costs are uh much lower so you could put them as a as a developer you basically put those costs into something like your Opera operation costs of like AWS and and whatnot but more recently a few months ago when we released uh momoka basically being able to do data availability transactions um I think we hit in total 640 000 transactions uh with the total cost

of uh 200 dollars for for all those transactions so what it means is that instead of doing an own chain comment or even of an on-chain pause we simply submit those transactions into Data availability at the layer and why this is radically innovative is that basically when you do um social media interactions you don't really need in most cases execution State and together with the data availability and and you can reduce your cost uh significantly so the user costs kind of are in a level where the applications can even start sponsoring as long as they cover those because somehow or they

figure a way of either sponsoring or baking into their fees when someone wants to make the make the content on chain so that's that's a kind of like a big uh Improvement there in terms of the um cost Associated and this is mainly because also social media data comes in bulks and what I mean that is that the way the blockchain works is that you have a block time and certain amount of space you can fill a block and when it comes social media execution your data is is bigger than those blocks so necessarily like you can't really feed a blockchain in a way it works but

you want to use it for example when you start creating handles and profiles and securing a follow bra for example so it's it's more about the design choices we made to create an architecture where these costs are mitigated and you still have the features you need for the right Primitives and and then the use cases so what what would be the updated cost so basically a 400 was the cost before momoka um what's the cost per user now so basically it's 0.0003 cents per transaction so it's quite in compared to something like AWS pretty much okay yeah that's I mean

that's basically negligible so why why haven't you opened it up to the wider public I I was always at the end of the impression that kind of the cost is uh is the largest reason here cost is interrupt largest for us now we we're currently focusing on um shipping the version 2 which is already going to devnet and what it means is that you can start integrating uh lens V2 already into existing applications and start testing out and and then obviously the mainnet will follow once uh things are looking good on that side um so maybe then I mean we can open up I think

cool so there's um one more topic a topic that I'd kind of like to cover and that's governance you already kind of talked about the lens improvements Improvement proposals um a bit ago um and I think this also addresses like part of Maher's question about kind of either meher creating this kind of lock-in uh application on top of lens um I mean it's it's pretty clear that as a protocol you need to be agile enough to kind of react to threats like that um so obviously kind of you need some sort of upgradability how does how does governance work then yeah currently the governance is basically more of a self-governance where you have uh

Builders coming and raising for example ideas that maybe this particular way could be done and differently or even from our team so maybe we realize that something needs to be changed a very recent Improvement burst for example that we noticed that over social media there's a lot of phishing attempts in actually there's increased amount of of uh fishing cases where the users are clicking some sort of a link um giveaway and they signed a pyramid transaction and what happens is that their nfts are moving out and this is basically the the whole kind of like a web tree user base that that is

affected it's not lens related but what we notice is that um to mitigate this issue we wanted to create a profile Guardian means that the profiles are non-transferable until you unlock this profile guardian and what it actually allowed to do is that we saw a case where one user actually was a victim of a phishing attempt but the profile Guardian saved that lens profile but all the other nfds were gone so it's an interesting Innovation that we basically did and we propose to the community and there was a discussion about you know how it can affect and and then it was voted in but down the line

what's important is that as the protocol gets so-called like protocol Market fit so we're still talking about a protocol that is zero to one so it's not always protocol you know it it has its market share and um that's a different story but once there's enough actually traction and it becomes um important for developers to see it being updated constantly and it has traction that's where kind of like the progressive governance kick in so what will be the next step to decentralized the governors and what with the step and how to involve the community and based on my experience with Alba it's it's quite lengthy process for sure

how do you see the current decentralized um socialist ecosystem so I mean we saw friend.tech uh image like two weeks ago or so and kind of quickly find its place somewhere um then we have farcasta Mastodon and so on how do you view that space I do think like all these initiatives apps and protocols they don't really have yet a product Market fit but I do think all these teams are working hard to get something um some are more protocols like Excellence is a protocol that you can build those experiences some are more of those end user experiences so um and you can see over even in the the

social media applications that are have integrated lands like orb or butterfly they're constantly coming with with new features and trying to kind of like a find um what might be exciting for their existing uh users I do think it is quite early and I think we aren't in a in a state yet where kind of like decentral social is has a good uh product Market fit um but I do think we do have those ingredients uh there that we can test and our goal is that we want to provide the flexibility for developers to actually try new things create New Primitives and see how that actually

helps them uh to create to to get that product Market fit and also at the same time be a bit of a bridge and get new users that are not for example in the ecosystem yet because I think that's the bigger goal here so if we're able to capture new users into web3 to new social experiences that will be amazing because you can come into the space without doing a financial transaction and that will be quite big paradigms shift for for our space clear thank you so much for joining us Dani and where can people learn more about lens and where do they shoot you a DM to kind of get an invite yeah you can uh

you can call lens.xyc and you can join the waitlist that's that's the most fastest you can also try and send me a DM on Twitter if you're already a lens user you can follow um the standard plans across all the applications that are integrated uh lens um yeah and be excited to see this podcast also on lens and being able to comment there as well and my additional thoughts as well yeah absolutely I personally am on lens uh it's my last name.lens but uh I'm not very active yet so we will have to get better here thank you so much