# urbe.eth | ETHRome│Social media protocols - limone.eth│ETHDam 2024

- Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal)
- Date: 2024-10-07
- Duration: 19:25
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-MlgCja2TdQg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlgCja2TdQg

## Description

"Social media protocols" with limone.eth from urbe.eth | ETHRome at ETHDam 2024. Why decentralization matters in social networks and how the Web3 socials ecosystem is evolving.
https://x.com/limone_eth https://x.com/urbeEth https://linktr.ee/urbe.eth https://x.com/ETHRome https://www.ethrome.org/ 

Sterling Schuyler - MC of ETHDam, copy and content writer for emerging fund managers & crypto enthusiasts.

ETHDam - a conference and hackathon held in the heart of Amsterdam, Netherlands from April 12th to 14th, 2024, celebrated its second edition, gathering more than 600 participants. 

In the dynamic space of ETHDam, privacy and security took center stage, featuring groundbreaking discussions on hacks, recovery, and the revolutionary work of figures like Pertsev. Privacy is dead in crypto, people that know, know. People who don’t know, should know. 

ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform growing in Amsterdam, spreading its roots to Rotterdam and Zürich.
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ETHDam AfterParty Fren
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## Transcript

[Music] so without further Ado we have lemon thank you good morning everyone I don't see your faces because there's light in front of me but yeah uh so thank you for coming here this early morning uh I'm lemon from Rome Italy uh I co-founded urb and itro the leading Community for web Tre Builders uh in Italy and I do a lot of aaton and building in in web Tre for two years now and I'm very passionated about social media protocol so like decentralized social networks in particular of course but I dig a lot into understanding better why um you know what are like the main issues that we have with centralized Solutions like Twitter Instagram or any other social that we use in our daily life and how protocols like foraster or lens are trying to solve these these issues so I already talk a little bit about myself uh so I just Let's Get It Started what are the key components of uh social networks so we have the name space meaning my username my display name whatever uh and in this case like lemon. it in uh um on Twitter uh you have the network so the social graph that is connecting people and users um on the on on the social network with content follows likes whatever the database that is the place where we store all the data and most of the time I mean it's a centralized thing the protocol it's defining like the rules and how people can actually interact with each other on the network thanks to the social graph as well the platform is like the website the user interfaces with which people can interact with each other and then again there are also some other rulle set like the feed uh or some forbidden actions things uh that you uh cannot do otherwise you get like suspended or banned and and all of these the problem is that with centralized social networks all everything that I mentioned like these key components are owned by a single company and single entity and they can do whatever you they want so think about our friend Elon ear I don't have nothing against him but it's just uh Twitter is is an example of what can happen in centralized social network so think about when Elon Chang like got to the control of the company changed the name and changed a lot of the rules set not only for users but also for Developers for example we we're also devs here so um we love playing around with apis and toolkits and new clients or whatever and Elon Musk here and the Twitter company also changed a lot of like rules like really rate limiting on the apis or things that you can extract or not from the network uh so centralization is definitely like not ideal also because as a user maybe you don't like the new feed or you don't like the new feature or maybe you you get banned for some weight reasons uh and it's not bad another thing that happened is that uh don't know if you he about this story that the X andle was not owned by uh X of course there was a guy owning it and uh Twitter claimed the username without um asking of course like permission to the guy because it's their database so they can just change uh a line in the database and the endle is now controlled by the X company and they also send out letter to the user saying that the X handle is now their own property and they sent him a Tesla for the uh for bothering him uh another problem with centralized social networks is that they are uh wallet Gans meaning that you can't easily Escape uh let's see let's say that you don't like Twitter anymore you don't like the new feed you don't like the new rules whatever you can't simply move into another social network because you have a social graph there you have your following your content uh your reputation and it's not easily exported and imported into another social platform uh so you simply can't escape even if you want that's why I think that we should uh build and use more open protocols rather than locking ourself into closed platforms and social networks uh even if open Protocols are not immune to centralization think about uh SM SMTP the email protocol uh most of us maybe use Gmail or um all Solutions while there are I don't know uh Outlook maybe is less used so somehow we are still centralizing ourselves toward certain services that are more usable maybe but at at least they allow us to choose what to use and what not and we can still communicate with each other so if I have a Gmail account I can send you an email on proton mail let's say moving further with the spectrum of decentralization before going to the decentralized example of our Caster uh we have also the ferse uh did anyone use Mastodon or know about the activity WB protocol here um yeah I can't see you but so Mastodon is one of the main examples of like a Federated social network which is to me a trade-off that is not worth it uh because in of course like U it has some pros and some Cons with respect to centralized examples but basically this activity P protocol it's defining like new rules or different rules with which people can interact with each other on these social networks and the main thing with the fediverse is that there's a diverse ecosystem of servers because users can spin up their own uh instances you can somehow migrate your account onto like uh these different servers according to your preference and uh um individuals and communities control the network because like each of This Server are not owned by a single company but there are like multiple instances controlled by me you and whoever uh wants to do it and these are like the pron of course there are also some cons because uh there are still some centralization Tendencies because not everybody is uh able or want to spin up a new server so what what happened is that most of the people are hanging out onto like three or four most popular servers and the problem with that is that you're not um giving your data to Twitter which is a I don't know like well regulated and public and exposed company but you're giving your data uh in the hands of some like obies around the world that maybe they are running their server at their own place they don't have any security um measures to protect your data or maybe they are selling your data to somebody else you you don't know about it uh there's also no end to end encryption and there's also communication silos because sometimes it's difficult to like these admins can prevent you to communicate with with other servers and yeah self hosting is also a challenge that's why there are not so many servers out there there are also protocols which I will not dig uh like today but there's Blue Sky which is an evolution of the activity Pub protocol and it was started inside the Twitter company and now it's a standalone project uh and it's following the Federated uh um example oh great I have my slides there I didn't know um yeah not anymore uh and then there's no so it uses public Keys is more like a niche and AER Community uh not very usable I'd say but it's just maybe some potential for for wider use let's go on chain so the main examples of decentralized social networks running on chainer lens and foraster um I guess you all know about like at least like you ever heard about these two players in the ecosystem foraster is a sufficient decentralized social network where lens got into a full decentralization uh approach uh they share something similar but they're also like very different in the way they develop their own uh ecosystem starting from lens uh again everything on lens is on chain it's running on polygon and it also has an L3 uh optimistic uh technology to store content that is called Moka um everything is an NFD so your profile is an NFD every time you follow somebody or like something you're meaning an NFD and that's why it's not really scalable because you need like to pay uh gas fees of course and you cannot even delete uh whatever you post or or create on the network uh it's cool but it's cool because you have like composability monetization modules you can extend your profile and easily like create new type of nfts that you can plug into um your client or experience to make things more inter interoperable and customizable uh and of course like it's fully decentralized so uh because it's running I mean fully decentral it's running on polygon so it's it's following their consensus uh about forecaster um foraster is uh sufficiently decentralized again this means that not everything is on chain the only thing that is running on chain on faset is the identity layer meaning that your uh username and your uh unique identifier in the network is start on a smart contract on optimisa everything else is running on an offchain uh peer-to-peer uh Network so it's getting this this network it's not getting synchronized with the standard consensus that we've seen in blockchain but it's just uh synchronizing theel with the eventual consistency um user names are readable it's very similar like to to Twitter in some ways the protocol is built like with the small text like I I think the maximum of of a cast which is a the Tweet is like 320 characters uh so it's very similar to Twitter but the most interesting thing about forecaster to me is the sufficient decentralization uh definition so a social network achieves sufficient decentralization if two users can find each other and communicate even if the rest of the network wants to prevent it and that's what we care about right and how we can achieve it so to achieve this sufficient decentralization um users should always be able to claim unique usernames meaning that if I'm lion. it nobody else can own my username and I'm the only one able to post with that username to the network and and the the last thing that I want to uh to to have as sub properties that I can always read messages from uh any valid usernames uh in the network so as long as these three properties old we have a sufficient decentralized social network and we are sure that we can always communicate with each other even if somebody wants to prevent it uh but how does it work I mean I already mentioned like the identity layer is running on chain on optimism so you can register a new ID with your public and private key uh and storing a new record in the registry so you have your address associated with an ID and a username uh usernames are also compatible with ens so you can use your ens as a username on forecaster and every message that you publish to the network is uh not going on chain again is going to a distributed Network peer-to-peer Network and you're authenticating each message with your signature so um that ABS can check uh was the real author of a Content because you're signing every message you're saying and messages in on forcaster are like new cast new post follows likes all the interaction that are happening are messages sent to this network that is constantly getting synchronized um the nodes of the network are called abs and people are running ABS I think there are like 400 apps right now in the foraster ecosystem and they are like synchronizing the state of the network constantly and allow people to create new client apps on their on their data so there are already some even some services that allow you to uh easily spin up an up and access an API to start building in the foraster ecosystem um yeah already talk about the IDS and names I mean uh human readable uh IDs are like uh canonical user identifiers incremental numbers uh I think there are like 300,000 users now on forecaster and they are now like compatible with the UHS again on foraster U on chain forecaster is not like Twitter on the blockchain foraster as onchain only things that are needed for the sufficient decentralization things uh and the blockchain like why they decided like to do it like this because the blockchain is a poor storage mechanism uh first of all because it's immutable and for a social network there's no point in having immutable content uh and of course is also band withd limited because like I was mentioning on lens whenever you want to do something you need to Mint or send a transaction uh and that's why I think like this approach is much healthier because it's much more scalable and I mean it's again it's a social network it's not a a governance system or any other like maybe payment system where you want full transparency and decentralization it's uh it's enough uh how the forecaster uh stack work so again I've mentioned here we have the identity layer on the on chain optimism and the ABS is like the decentralized is the distributed P2P Network synchronizing the state for the network and we have the application layer here where you can build like new apis interacting with the apps and these apis can interact for with new client uh that you can uh build on top of it so there are already 10 20 clients both web and mobile uh Native uh and many like open source stuff so it's easy very easy to start building in this ecosystem this is a simplified version so accounts on optimism username on enss the data ipis is on abble abble is an open source library to spin up a hub and then you have the application L year like we have warp cast which is the main client then you have Jam yup and supercast is another one getting some traction lately and yeah again uh why the blockchain because blockchain uh so why it's better like to build decentralized social networks uh on blockchain because blockchains are distributed and uh ownerless so no single actor can modify uh or control a smart contract meaning that your username is uh old and owned only by you and nobody can revoke that from you uh and blockchains are also permissionless and public so anybody can access their uh States build software on top of it without asking permission to anybody so you don't need an API key I was mentioning like Twitter rate limitation and Rule changing on forecaster but also on lens you don't need to care about people changing your uh rules so as a developer you can build and feel like safe that nobody's changing stuff uh so again why thecentral social just to W up a little bit account ownership uh meaning that you are the only owner uh of your account nobody can control it data portability because there's no need for migrations uh like we were mentioning for Twitter or M for example because everything is running on a shared layer so if both on lens on forcaster if I want to move between clients I can still plug in my own identity social GR content whatever because I'm still logging in with the same wallet or public private key pair permission is innovation because you can build services on top of these protocols without asking permission to anybody censorship resistance and moderation it's something that I didn't touch in the talk but uh for both like lens and forecaster Protocols are open so everybody can publish stuff of course like people can also publish like bad stuff uh uh and nobody can censor them at the protocol but what happens is that clients can of course like moderate content uh at their own purposes uh in the application layer so let's say that I have a forecaster client where I want people to only talk about cats uh if there's somebody talking about dogs I can moderate them but I can't prevent them to still publish to the to the network and to the protocol so that if somebody else want to build a dog based client they can still uh build it and read dog based content and that's it thank you like these are my my handles if you want like to reach out on Twitter or foraster uh and if you have any question happy to answer them awesome thank you so much uh can we have the lights on uh so that we can at least see um do we have any questions for lemon about uh about social or how awesome his hat is yeah um how can we incentivize people to participate in positive ways instead of trying to manipulate uh social media like distributed ways like through using Bots or um through like spamming things like I in crypto in particular I think communities really struggle because there's so many people Shilling random projects and it's really hard to um you filter through all of what people are trying to promote all these project yeah yeah this this has been an issue lately because like especially on for lot of like spam get to the network because uh the the the social network was growing so of course like people looking for air drops or other stuff started joining uh foraster registering new accounts and spam has been a problem of course it's not a problem as big as you have maybe on Twitter uh where you can simply like register an account uh on foraster of course is still an each so there are less people than Twitter so still less noise and the other thing that is preventing like spam to grow after a certain threshold is that to register an account on both like lens and forecaster you need to run a transaction so you need also to to spend money for example on forecaster uh It costs $5 to create an account because you need to pay for the storage uh that you're using so this is already somehow preventing most of the spam but still there there are bots in the network and there's a lot of work being done at the client side uh of things to uh create new user experiences or new algorithms that prevent you from reading spammy messages so it's it's not again if you you you can't prevent uh Bots at the protocol level because that will be even being able to sensor content at the protocol level we don't want that but you can still moderate and read content however you prefer on the client side of things so then I hope that this answer so it's about people in applications finding their best way and maybe even open sourcing them uh to um avoid spammy content awesome thank you did we have one more question no awesome well thank you so much again thank you [Music]