LFGrow Summit | Intro to Lens Protocol

[Music] [Applause] [Music] so with that we are ready for our next talk and that is us going a deeper into how the lens protocol is set up so you can actually learn about the internals of what you can actually do from my graph standpoint and uh without further ado like to welcome david and josh to go into all those details josh david appreciate this and uh i'll let you uh get started awesome thank you thank you so much let me get our little presentation up here uh gm everyone my name is david uh i'm the product manager for social over at ave companies and that includes lens and i'm super fortunate to be joined today by josh uh josh stevens he is one of our amazing leading lead back-end devs uh who helped create the lens api which we're going to get into uh later today we just want to give a quick overview of the lens protocol uh you know why we built it what you can do with it uh what are some awesome things you can hack on it try to give out some ideas some alpha as well as what the lens api is why we built it and and what are some of the things you guys can build with it um so without a do let's kind of jump into a quick overview of lens protocol so you know why did we go out and and and build lens well web 2 social media is broken um networks they sell your data um i think it's mentioned a lot in the last session but you're paying with your personal information uh to get distribution there's no such thing as privacy the reason you're not paying for facebook you're not paying for twitter because they're taking their your data they're turning around and selling ads um and additionally your data is not portable as a creator as a user i am bound to the network i'm working with um if all of a sudden facebook or youtube decides to turn me off for any reason i've lost my audience i've lost my content i've lost my connection to my fans and and that can spell the end of a career um in addition i have no ability to go between uh any two services um it it turns this uh you know this this social graph into a moat uh whether or not the app is better uh if i'm a startup and i've created this really great new user experience these new fair algorithms or something that people like uh i have to bootstart this you know jumpstart this graph uh and i'm at a huge disadvantage even though i have an objectively better product and lastly user data centralized right we we've all seen what happens when when large databases exist they become targets for actors uh act bad actors things can get hacked data gets leaked never a good situation uh the last thing we need is is more scams uh and more hacks and so the goal with lens is to use web3 tools uh to bring power back to the users back to the creators uh and really change the game theory of web of web to social it's currently zero sum uh you know facebook only makes money off of data in their system as does twitter as does tick tock and they're all incentivized to really lock you into those ecosystems build in positive feedback loops using web3 we can turn on its head and we're going to do that with lens protocol we're going to allow developers to build apps and tools on a singular composable and decentralized social graph so so what does that mean it means that we are going to have all of the data built using nft technology owned by users um on on a permissionless blockchain um you know we are we are currently building on polygon our test nets are on the mumbai test net we're getting ready to go to mainnet soon um and it allows app developers to focus on the user experience on a ui ux and content moderation rather than user acquisition and for creators and users you own your links to your audience you own your content and you own your monetization um and if you don't like a certain platform and you want to go elsewhere it's as easy as clicking currently today connect wallet i agree with what blog you said in the last session of hopefully we get better terminology so with that let's let's dive into a little bit of how lens works under the hood what is the actual kind of infrastructure that we're building um the first kind of key primitive is is the profile the profile nft um if you've ever worked with unstoppable domains or ens very very similar we have this this nft that represents your profile it's got your handle for example i could be at david josh would be at josh uh it lives in my wallet i can have multiple in the same way that when i'm on twitter i have at davide silverman my nice fancy professional account and a couple of anons where i like to you know post post things that i want to keep personal um it's minted upon creation um i can have other metadata on there maybe a bio um but i also have this special array uh that i can fill with publications um this is where i kind of post my content to and we'll come back to exactly what publications are are in a minute um in addition it has another field called follow module and we're going to come to that a bit later as well the next thing we have is is following um we represent follow with a follow nft um if if my wallet davidev.eth wants to follow at josh uh i'll i will execute that transaction using lens uh and i will receive a at josh follow nft it'll say that i follow at josh um it will have an a token id based on the order i followed so i'm his fifth follower and it'll also have a reference to his latest publication which is really interesting because it means when i go to try to render this follow nft in any wallet whether that be you know rainbow or even a smart contract well like gnosis safe or or i go to openc or zapper it's going to resolve to whatever his last publication was which means every single wallet uh has now become a distribution mechanism uh for for my for my uh for me as a creator a content creator in addition these follow nfts have built-in governance and so every creator has a built-in social token just without the erc20 um let's say josh uh tweets out a bunch of really great developer alpha uh he you know he he publishes out a lot of great stuff on salinity he can pull his audience you know should he be should he be doing on snapshot you can say i want my first 500 followers you know have them tell me uh if i want to do uh some more stuff on on maybe ave v3 or if i want should be diving into alca mixed v2 and his hell his audience kind of decide what he wants to build we then kind of get into what a publication is so a publication uh is just really kind of a a bunch of metadata that says where to find content and some things about that content um lens takes it's completely agnostic as to where the actual data itself is stored you can reference a place on chain you could also reference ipfs ar weave uh ceramic you could even reference old web 2 a url or word an s3 bucket um and that just tells you where to get the content and in the metadata you can fill out anything as you normally would you can even say what application it's posted with you can also add this thing called a collect module which will produce a collect nft um this allows any publication to be turned into its own standalone nft um where the creator kind of defines the minting logic um let's say i post this really great image uh of a recent trip to london um my i can set monetization i want to allow you know anyone to be able to collect this that's our term for mint for one eath um and when they go through and pay me the one eath all of a sudden they have a collect nft in their wallet uh exactly mirrored from the original publication i can even include additional logic uh for mirrors mirrors is how somebody retweets uh so if somebody wants to share my content let's say i post that really great image of my trip from london and josh decides to mirror that on his own feed and somebody collects it from seeing josh's feed i can actually specify a certain amount of that uh mint fee to go to josh's wallet and so we can actually even incentivize curation entirely on xing um publications come in in three types regular posts which is uh the plain use case i've posted an image or i've posted a piece of text or i've posted a video using live peer um it also has this concept of comment which is um a reference to another another publication as well as some additional content so i can comment on someone else's uh image with uh with my own with my own image maybe it's a meme with my own text this is a great image or again any other arbitrary content and the last type of publication is a mirror just a simple reference uh that's the same thing as a a retweet or a share we're talking in current web 2 formulation now as a as a web3 developer how can i kind of build in interesting uh extensions to lens well lens kind of has these things called modules and they allow you to build arbitrary logic onto uh onto lens protocol and they come in three places and they they are really powerful the first one is the follow module and this is set on on a per profile basis the follow module it runs its arbitrary logic that will run and it has resolved to a boolean yes or no to let you know whether or not a follow nft is minted so in my wallet davidev.eth tries to follow at josh his follow module will run and using some series of conditions will decide whether or not me david e v.e the wallet is allowed to follow him and we can do really powerful things with that right i can say that only people who hold certain nfts are allowed to follow me maybe i want to restrict it to certain nfts on polygon or i could even use a chain link oracle to say you have to hold an avax warrior on avax or a board ape or a punk on mainnet in order to follow me um i can make it payment you have to pay me five eth to follow me uh i could make it you have to have some pull-up or been at these different events you can make it as complex as you would like uh any of these so long as it kind of just comes back to a zero one value additionally you can have that follow nft go to a smart contract you could use that to you know build out subscriptions if you don't top up this contract every now and then uh you know one with five matic every month um i'm gonna pull away your follow relationship and now we've built kind of subscriptions the next one is a reference module and this is run before uh somebody tries to comment or mirror my piece of content so i post an image let's say uh via my david profile if uh josh wants to try to comment or mirror uh the reference module will run on a per-publication basis and decide whether or not remember a boolean answer at the end whether or not josh is allowed to reference either comment or mirror and again i can do simple token gating uh only people with 32fwb are allowed to reply to my content uh only people who have certain nfts are allowed to reply to my content and i can combine this with other higher level integrations a really interesting use case would be what if i wanted to build a completely private social network uh on top of lens well i could have the actual content in a publication be stored in ceramic encrypted using lit protocol another sponsor in this hackathon and i could have the the access control uh b you need to have at least 32 with your wallet to get the decryption in order to see what the post is and i can also have the comment collect uh and mirror functions all require that i have 32fwb in my wallet at a given time and then the only people are allowed to engage with my content view you know sorry read and write need to be in my community and so that's that's reference and the last area is collect i think collect is really the most powerful and that is logic that is run to decide whether or not this kind of collect nft uh this nft that references this original publication uh is minted so the example is i i post an image and i can say you know for one eth this gets minted out into an nft that you can control i can set a cap hey here's you only can do this five times uh you do this five times with incrementing uh so the first one is one eighth next one is one point one eighth we could also do really complex logic and community has really jumped at this we we have a the community wrote one that does defy aware nfts so i will sell my nft for 5matic but before the transaction completes it takes thematic deposits it into ave and sends the a tokens to the creators now creators have kind of you know self-driving nfts we have another one the the great folks over at um at klima came and built in the refi collect module um which you could even extend the logic further and say hey take some of the you know look at how much gas this transaction used convert that to carbon offsets take some of the incoming um the incoming funds convert it using toucan to base carbon based carbon token retired on chain and now my entire transaction is carbon neutral so that's some of the stuff you can do with collect and different ways for people to build on top of lens and what our goal with lens is to really foster a broad diverse and evolving social ecosystem fully composable and transferable on chain social graph you can go from one application to another you can bring all of your followers you can bring all of your content you can bring all of your nft and nfts and it's composable to any other application whether it be nft mentors whether it's defy or other blockchain applications that are yet to come can build on top of these existing tools that we're building follower nfts allow for social dows and new types of social tokens governance mechanisms including snapshot delegation and compatibility with ave governance as well as governor bravo are fully built in and lastly the real key thing is modularity we allow developers to focus on the experience and the front end and leave the network effects to the protocol you don't need to create a bootstrapping plan you know as users start using any application built with lens your application has access to all of those users as well we call the protocol lens as the lens plant you know enriches the soil around it allows other plants to grow around it and that's kind of our view from the ecosystem changing from a zero-sum game that we currently see in web 2 to a collaborative sum game in web 3. now in addition to just the web three um you know the web three hooks that we have with modules josh going to talk to you about the lens api which is something that we have built at ave to allow sliding three solidity free web three social development josh cheers david um bear with me i have got covered but i should be okay um so yeah we have um built a api for all of this so if you're building a social media site uh the key things that are super important is you know speed um you know if you're on twitter etc etc if you lose that speed it becomes unfun uh scalability um and traceability all these things are super important to be able to get to um now we were building an api na for our own internal needs but we thought why not share that with you guys so the api is it abstracts all the complex things about the the protocol away so as david's been talking about how many amazing features there is um like modules different kind of modules that take in different input parameters all these kind of things um the api abstracts that way to a simple enum uh with you know standard stuff to pass in if you want to enable a reference module that only your followers can comment it's a boolean and it will construct the data for you the sign type data and then you just send it on the client so uh it's more of more of a helper tool and a traceability tool and we think it's super important that you know if we're going to build the next social platform that we have tools so web 2 developers can just focus on building a say board ape community or you know anything like that without having to understand the protocol completely because it is you know quite overwhelming with how many features there is um so that's the idea do you want to hit the next slide david um so build front ends fast with the lens api so you don't have to worry about indexing or querying the data or reorgs or speed of fetching the data everything is done for you um and everything's done super quick so we have an indexer watching all the data we index that data so we can grab it quick and when you get a publication back all that data is extracted for you if someone said hello world that data would say content hello world it would extract the module for you saying you know they have a fee to collect this which is naught point nor eat um one eve and then you have a simple way to be able to construct that and redeem it with another function called collect so all these things allow you to you know really just focus on what you guys need to build and want to build um you don't have to deal with any real data so we have crons watching the data making sure that the hash still exists and then removing them away um from the uh queries if they if they don't exist anymore uh we have full caching layer on there to allow this to be super quick uh you know the the queries are really really fast they're gonna grab everything that you want um you know some of this data to grab is super complex like you know a publication can include you know how many times it's been mirrored how many times it's been collected how many comments it's got a publication is an unlimited pointer so what i mean by that is you can have a post and a comment and it can go unlimited depth and it can keep pointing and pointing and pointing so um being able to scale that uh like how facebook and twitter do really quickly to have that user experience is super important um you don't have to worry about pre-filling the contract data or validating it and what i mean by that is we have these with sig methods that where you know you just pass you want to collect a publication and all you literally do is pass the publication id it will construct you all the type data for you it will a validate that you conform to all the modules as well so say you have to follow to collect this publication it will validate that for you and throw a web to error saying hey you don't follow this person so you can't collect it does that for everything for uh you know if you don't have enough balance if you don't if you haven't approved them um enough for the token uh all these things allow a much better development experience where straight away you know all that's gone wrong with the program or what you know and this person doesn't have enough balance etc etc as i said before it's a web 2 style interface so if you go to the twitter api it's super easy to just go and get all the followers or you know following yes it's heavily rate limited and but we took inspiration from the kind of you know the web 2 interfaces and just as easy it is to get the followers that are on twitter it's just as easy to get the followers that are on lens uh it's just as easy to grab all the publications it's just as easy to get everything a user has collected um and all these things is super important for growth for the lens protocol um and i think what one of the biggest things is there's not a huge learning curve you know the whole api is built using graphql you know it's super easy to fetch what you need when you need it um and you can just focus on the stuff that you want to build so all the documentation is is there for you to use uh and yeah we're super excited for you guys to use it and give us some feedback about how it helped you or how we could improve it uh yeah it's uh super cool awesome thanks josh a few other things i want to point out about the api that i think are going to be kind of key and also point a bit about the strategy we're doing with lens you know the first thing is we want to give web 3 developers really awesome new powerful tools to build with um some of the ones we're super excited about these d fileware nfts with collects we're really trying to see what people can do with follow nfts and this concept of social dows on the web 2 side right we want to make things easy and approachable for brand new developers right not every single person wants to be an expert in solidity or should be an expert in solidity the reason web3 social is going to win out is because we're approachable for everyone and that is really the goal with the lens api we also want to make sure that every single application built on lenses the lens api is going to get a top-notch set of features so beyond just access the full social graph there are built-in queries for for search for timeline for explore common pages you may want to put in a social graph in addition you know we have it we have a data science team the same kind of app you know we've kind of said that ave is working on its own front end the same algorithms will be powering that are going to be ported through the api so as as those algorithms kind of get built out and improved your application will gain from that as well we think that's kind of a big thing we want to help out not everyone's a data science expert you know you can kind of pump in from an existing awesome data science team and the last thing is really making easy to use tools so people can focus on novel and unique um experiences we want to abstract away the blockchain for developers who may not be familiar with it and that's really the design goal of the lens api can i just have one more thing just to put it into perspective how much easier that it makes for you um to unfollow someone uh actually to do that you have to burn the follower nft of that profile now that profile itself every profile has their own follower contract address right and you could have minuted three or four different tokens in there and on chain there's no way to go hey how many tokens do i own of this without looking at the insta indexer but with the api you literally just go i want to unfollow this profile it'll construct all the data for you it will do all that all the joins that needs to happen and all you do is sign and send that transaction and then you can follow that person that's just one of many examples where it really helps the development of anything that you do on this protocol definitely a big thing i also want to i want to shout out is you know we have our bounty tracks i think i think you know we teased this at the start of this session we're really looking for people to build front ends on top of it i know there was a uh some some people talking in the chat like is there a reference ui well we hope that people build a reference ui there's been a couple of great tools uh in the lens community that's been built so far uh inside of uh if you go to the lens discord um i think there was there was a simple explorer a profile creator and a way to build statuses and that was running on our on our test net um for anyone building please make sure you use the new test net we're looking for protocols people who are going to build some really novel interesting collect modules reference modules and uh follow modules i think there was a a brainstorm session we were doing in the uh in the voice chat of discord and somebody was talking about it they were thinking you could do you know on-chain private dms with read receipts using custom collect modules uh lit protocol and ceramic um not saying that hits a couple different sponsors for the hackathon and partners maybe it's a cool thing to build um there's tons of really awesome things that that can be built here and on the tooling side we want to make it so that this is still a friendly place for developers um you know building explorers building vampire attacks to help the entire network gain from stealing users from instagram twitter snapchat uh tick tock i'm probably gonna get in trouble with legal for saying all these names but i'm i'm calling out targets we want we want we want these uh you know we want people we want everyone to kind of gain from web3 social show that there's more use cases for blockchain than just speculative tokens and then lastly you know stani said earlier in the last session you're never building by yourself but you're always part of an ecosystem and we've learned this really really early on with lens the community has jumped through our bounty program and built more modules than we even built as the original genesis team and has given so much feedback we had to redeploy a brand new test net just for this hackathon um to make sure that people were using the most up-to-date feature set um and so we really encourage as you guys are building please provide feedback what else do you want to see in the contracts what else should we be putting in to all of these different uh to all of these different uh primitives or you can write updates the primitives yourself you know um come help build this next generation social graph and same for the api what else do you want to see in this api how can we make your lives easier as developers how can we make this community grow how can we do it all together how can we really help this ecosystem so you know we we are we are going to be around uh all week in the eth global discord we're going to be in the lens discord we're going to be on twitter um to really really definitely want to want to hear from you on what we can do best um so that's uh you know that's that's lens at a very high level um as always you can reach out to anyone on the team for questions feedback and comments and we look forward to seeing what everyone here builds and we hope you guys have a great hackathon thanks guys um karjak sending it back over to you hey we're back kartik broke away from the uh had a little technical issue there so we're gonna go to a quick break thank you guys that was awesome much appreciated and um everybody we can uh hold for just a couple minutes till our next talk comes thanks everyone [Music] all right um sorry about that i just uh i had some technical difficulties on on my end everybody um i think we are a little bit ahead of uh kind of uh we're a little bit out of schedule here so what we'll do is kind of take a quick break and a lot of you've been kind of watching this for a good uh two hours already with the logistics and the last panel in the discussion so uh while we wait for the next set of speakers to kind of join in and get ready for our next talk we will take a quick five minute break and uh and then come back so uh we're just going to put on timer in the meantime enjoy some little five beats and i will see you all very shortly all right welcome everybody hope you had a good uh quick five minute break and with that we are ready for our next talk so next talk we're gonna talk about what does it mean to kind of get more creative on building on top of lens and for this panel we actually have three uh amazing people so we have rich ramon and simon from we3 and they're going to be talking about all the things that you can do and how you can extend uh your creativity with with lens so without further ado let's welcome all of them here on stage unless and to turn their videos on and i'll let you all get started hey everyone uh nice to meet you um i think we should we just get started cardig absolutely yes also uh we should have flipped the video on so at the left you can see as well one second just going to the start of our slides okay um give me one second uh can you see at least my slides for now yes okay um okay cool um so okay uh rich simon are you guys ready too so i can kick it up absolutely go for it good okay cool so uh welcome everybody thanks for being pro this is talk number three four uh so still staying with us and excited to have uh quite a few folks here to kind of like listen to what we have uh brought to you today um today it's a lot about kind of like what can you do with lens and what like how to think differently about what products or innovation you can build on top of it and uh kind of like what where where this could lead so i think we already heard a lot from stani and uh josh and david of like what lens is so i shortly just kind of like want to introduce us in the call and maybe rich and simon once you talk you maybe can just introduce yourself very shortly who you are and kind of like what you do but uh i'm ramon i'm part of we free we free is a web-free design collective so we're a bunch of designers who realize that webfree is growing exponentially and it's one of the most interesting area for design to come in because it's early because we don't really know yet how to use it best because it's still hard to use and so we came together and we realized there's a lot of space for making the space more accessible more inclusive opening it up for the next generation of users and we primarily do this through helping through product and uh brand strat product design and brand strategy and really help kind of like building narratives from like early ideas to actually bring it to the market uh maybe a little bit of how we got involved in lens just to kind of like as a little bit of disclosure we have been working with them since quite a while in the background to really shape the brand and the the brand itself of lance but also kind of like help expand what lens could mean for the ecosystem i think stunning was saying is like it's really about building an ecosystem and so what we have been tasked to help out in the last few weeks is really kind of like pushing the edges of like what lens could do in several places and really help to kind of like shape that so with that i would love to shortly talk about why we or we believe or i believe social graphs matter or what social graphs are um being a designer in that space i i think it took me quite a while to understand what the hell is a social graph why does it matter and i i or we use the metaphor of kind of like it's a little bit an iceberg so like we know social media we know news feeds we know friends list we know that it matters to have friends online or being able to connect to them and like write with them through messengers but it's really kind of like just the top of the iceberg that we really see here and there's like there's so much data and connections and content or connections that below the surface that are part of the social graph that are not really accessible for us but they're also kind of like the bread and butter of like the traditional web 2 platforms like facebook twitter and all of that so kind of like think from for most people that coming to the space talking about the social graph it's really just kind of like the top of the iceberg but like what is really exciting is like what lies below that and what we mean with that is like that basically everything has a social graph right when we started to explore lens it was a lot about like is this social medias is this a new news site is this a feed is this a friends list like what is it really and the reality today is that basically everything that web 2 touches and potentially web free will touch too has a social graph has a social component where we connect with each other being it from sending and transacting from one wallet to one wallet kind of like following someone's on chain activity to kind of like the more traditional web 2 applications like twitter or all of that so when thinking about where lens is going i think one thing a wrong button is this is bigger than decentralized twitter i feel like when we start to ideate in this space we often end up with decentralized twitter uh a new news site it's like the the go-to things and we really wanted with this kind of like exploration and what we're going to show you today to kind of push what what an open graph can enable for an ecosystem itself what we what we mean with this is that a social graph tetris obviously social media and news feeds right it it's about how the a news feed is curated what we're seeing there but like we start to zoom out there it's as much about music movies and entertainment right we share playlists we get recommendations we play together we watch things let's play video on twitch together so it's kind of like all of those has a huge social component how we kind of like connect with each other and do things together and like that can be even broader in the sense of like uh in in the realm of like uh matchmaking so like it's it can lean from car uh creators matching to create something together on tick tock through a duet to kind of like actual matchmaking through dating to finding collaborators in a dao so like a lot of those are built on social connections and and doing that so it's like web free is already inherently social and we need to get to the next step there and that can and i think like when we think about where social graph can be helpful it's as much about social media the metaverse governance shopping working gaming it really can encompass all of this which makes it sometimes really hard to start but also kind of like shows hopefully how broad broadly applicable like a protocol like lens could be so with that we wanted to kind of like highlight what are some core challenges that we think we can address through new new experiences and new product design and one thing is there's a huge chance to kind of like give more power or control uh to users so we surround like with web 2 facebook twitter snapchat you name it tech talk we surrendered a lot of power and control for convenience right we give away control over over our data with sign in with google and now we have wallets so like we're really kind of like in the state of empowering the user again but like this empowering is also kind of like frightening but like it's actually really kind of like a new paradigm shift for social media that you're in control of your social graph of your connections and that you can shape it and control it and that's quite a novelty so like the question for us really should be so how might we balance the control and the power that we gain with kind of like also ease of use through better ux and ui design here so that we still get some of that convenience back number two that we think is super valuable here is like around uh insights and the the reality is we have a information asymmetry in the current uh social graph world right uh platforms like spotify like google like all of that they have a ton of data on us and we might potentially even have access to that but it's really hard for us to understand and acting on that like so platforms often more know about ourselves than we do and i think with opening up the social graph now of that again this power of insight this reflection and understanding can shift back to us so kind of like how can we use web-free on-chain uh activity this general more transparency in this space to to give not just not just to create more trust but like also more insights about ourselves so what if if those open graphs that we talk about kind of like really allow us to understand and reflect about ourselves our communities and new ways next i think it's important to kind of like acknowledge that lens is a protocol not a platform and um i i still stole this one from one of my favorite paper called like i had platforms uh protocols on the platform but i think that this kind of like idea of like portability that you're able to choose how you experience content or being in control of that or moving moving your friends list or your friends list is moving with you and doesn't have to be established again it's quite a big change in like how we understand like uh open graphs itself so this idea of portability is not novel for us i feel in web free where we have wormholes where we have talk about cross chain and like we're trying to figure that out but like this idea of like that social media is not a unique universe a world garden but it's more like the marvel cinematic multiverse where things can coexist and connect with each other i feel is quite a novelty and like so thinking about this what we're going to talk about is kind of like leaning into the last point is the more power we have the more we understand ourselves and the data that's established through those places and kind of like we create more portability that allows us to completely rethink what a front-end could be like how we interact with it right it's like if you don't like how what data you get out of the front-end or if that could be more like you you move on you build your own and like that that is a quite novel approach to kind of like go often also going a little bit more back how the internet was like a long time ago so what this allows us to do it's kind of like it allows to kind of like lead with better design because there's more competition hopefully more choice and like also oh not everything has to be brought you can also design uh for for niches itself so with that that's kind of like a little bit an intro how we got excited about working with lens itself and like why social graphs matter and i'm handing this over now to uh rich and simon to kind of like dive a little bit into uh some clusters of ideas that we had so far um rich simon i'm going to mute myself but please free to move on nice um thanks ramon um yeah so we've got a few ideas that we've been tinkering on you know obviously such a such a big space such a big area so much opportunity of where to innovate so where do we begin um well we've sketched out a few ideas that we'll share with you uh just to get the juices flowing and you can consider these as kind of like interesting territories to explore um some of them are really kind of like the natural breaking points of where web 2 social media sort of breaks down or where you might find the cracks there um and other areas are really where sort of web3 enables us to create something net new um so you hear us talk a lot about what ifs we'll be sort of posing a few questions i really really these are just kind of prompts against which we think would be interesting to explore so you know let us know what you think riff with us ask questions and uh throw ideas down in the chat as well so let's uh let's dive right in yeah absolutely you're going to hear a lot of what is from us uh for the next little while so so settle in uh but we're kicking off with some ideas around uh lens tooling because uh when we're we're building something new here something from the ground up which means that you know we get to start pretty fresh we get to set up the tools and the systems that help make us make the most of that sort of like green pasture of new social um the issue is right now much of today's tooling for social is completely boxed off it's like pretty hard or impossible to change or to interact with so it's it's really exciting to start to think about breaking that and giving users the power of the tools that make the most of that new social so we've been thinking a little bit about some tools that people can create to get the most of their lens social graph and if you give it a little scroll now we've got one here um all about verification because right now verification is controlled by social media platforms and not really the communities that grow into them or grow to use them and that can like stifle the innovation or it can lead to even verification being a centralized platform swim cough cough blue tick uh so what if social media verification meant more than just being a real person what if it instead sort of captured any kind of label that was meaningful to community or to an individual or set of individuals so like broadening this kind of uh this idea of verification to an extensible system of tags that could be attached to you know users to communities even to posts would help us open up a rich new set of experiences so again some what ifs like what if a distributed fact-checking community could tag post that's researched and evaluated as like trusted maybe what if a curated collection of articles uh written by award winners could easily be created and automatically kept up to date what if an idea could even be traced back to its roots and its tree of posts and replies and lastly what if a company's online profile could be tagged with this global carbon footprint but speaking of influence and that sort of like sense of meaning to community how about kind of getting a sense of where you as an individual community stand in your graph yeah so um another thing we're sort of thinking about is really the you know what's the default visual expression or sort of the visual viewing paradigm of your social media experience and you know today the typical just to give it some context so you can sort of understand you know where the ideas are coming from but the typical viewing paradigm really centers around like an infinite feed of content um that's designed by the businesses and the platforms really to drive as much engagement and as much consumption as possible and i don't know if you guys have seen the social uh dilemma but uh the guy that you know invented infinite scrolls sort of often regrets kind of how that's led to a lot of mindless consumption so you know things like your relationships and what you actually might learn about them um seem to be things that are really like secondary features in in today's social media experience so you don't really see those things that they're just they're just lists of contacts in secondary features um with something like the open social graph though i mean i think what's interesting here is that because this is these experiences are being powered by that data it's like this ever-growing model that's capturing information about your relationships with people you know groups and communities and even businesses um now that we have ownership over that what's also interesting is that we also have um choice uh or possibility about how data is actually expressed or visualized so you know the question that we're exploring here is uh you know what other ways could you express or visualize your social graph you know what other new paradigms might we create to view your experience and in this little illustration we've got here my digital roots you know we're imagining something more of an interactive graphical view it's like a sketch but of what your relationships look like and this is something that could emphasize relationships over content so you can imagine different filters and and different toggles you switch on and off to kind of you know explore your network um but you know what else could it do perhaps it could actually help you see the degree of your influence or your reach or even your exposure to different types of people from different groups perhaps you could also even see like timelines of your relationships and how your connections have flourished or diminished over time and you know perhaps even understand more insightfully like things like your frequency of contact or the dynamics or the interactions of your exchanges with others so there's a lot of insight that can actually be drawn that we're not privy to at the moment in sort of web to social media and these are things that could be interesting and when you sort of frame it in the idea of like you know could you actually improve your relationships with people it starts to become quite interesting and then you think about um what could this mean not just to your friendship circle but when you start to consider teams or professional networks like what happens then um and uh yeah to sort of like close out this little sort of territory like ritual sort of uh chime in now on um what tools could be like to make most of your experience with it yeah you give us a scroll there i'm on yeah so right now um you know we're all using the web and we're all subject to these really opaque algorithms that are kind of ruling the current social media experience you know they're deciding what to show or even what vanishes into the ether and what doesn't get seen by users and we've got very little sort of influence over what we actually see because those algos are trade secrets you know we're unable to show how the inputs and the interactions can influence the kind of contents that we might then consume so what if we were able to have greater control over our feeds over the way we can stream different media across platforms set our own rules even our own standards our own algorithms by which to kind of sort filter and discover that content then the open graph not only allows anyone to build their own front-end experiences but also perhaps the very engines themselves that define her content breaks through to the surface you can infuse a point of view over which content should be prioritized and filtered based on different needs and different tastes at your own whim so a few what ifs what if you could choose from multiple open source algorithms or lenses by which you could view your lens feeds what if there are easy ways to managed permissions around what personal data a front-end might use to personalize recommendations or what if those algorithms were like completely transparent and tunable to this point that you might even be able to jump in and sort of change a change of lever to see what you what you're viewing and then this is a fun one what if you could even flick a switch and have a completely different content experience even like view the world through the eyes of your friends celebrities or like total wild cards from the other side of an echo chamber but that's enough about those kind of foundations that kind of tooling what about what we should do specifically for creators yeah so i mean obviously this is you know when you think of web 3 and social media it's very much synonymous with creators and the creator economy it just feels like there's so much potential to create new types of experiences for creators but also for fans as well and i think like we're interested in um also how you can sort of foster connection from nuanced data around tastes and preferences how can that inform empower new types of connection between creators but also between um creators and fans um so if we scroll down a little bit one of the things we're wondering about is uh the idea of collaboration and and how matchmaking could serve um greater collaboration how how lens sort of might facilitate that and to give it some some backstory i mean today you know creators around the world you know they collaborate with fellow artists and writers and musicians and brands um to develop fresh content and often it's about furthering reach and actually growing audiences as well as you know experimenting with different types of content um and you know you tend to find that it creates new dialogue can bring communities together and all that sort of good stuff but i think what sometimes challenging is you know how do you find and signal that you're sort of looking for this sort of collaboration whether it's for like a project or for an art piece or for a dao or for brand how do you find the people to work with um so the question we're exploring here is you know how might we use our insights in the open graph to match creators together and catalyze new content and uh created collaborations so how do we make that seamless more easy and we're thinking about tools for things like audience insight and matchmaking so in our little sketch here you can imagine a creator is seeing different types of potential matches or collaborators that are being served to them and here we've got a kind of like a tinder style where you're where you're seeing different types of folks perhaps matched on certain criteria or content preferences or perhaps it's about you know like how you're signaling certain project ambitions um and then next to that like the idea of like this merged graph so this is interesting when you have like a visual overlay you know what what if you could have two creators that could easily and perhaps visually compare and contrast their audiences um to see where they overlap in taste and preferences but also to sort of see the gaps and the differences where they sort of might grow um so these are a few ideas just around matchmaking within the context of creators but matchmaking of course is a theme that is going to run through lots of different verticals as well so you know what as you as you take this forward you know think about like what does this mean across different platforms or even gaming or finding collaborators in dals to start projects together or even dating um but that's sort of a little bit about the creators now let's sort of think a little bit about the fans as well yeah what about flipping that about the sort of the fan experience um because fan engagement is obviously huge for growth um and access to you know maybe if your creator access to the data about your followers um you know or uh is pretty limited on today's platforms it means that you know it could be pretty tricky to have sort of like valuable interactions or even even any it's all discussion to understand the sort of your fans and your followers oftentimes it's even like fragmented across different channels across different apps uh it's really hard to have a sort of central discussion uh to engage the sort of like feeling across different channels so we're thinking about how how might we provide creators with tools and resources better understand their fans even deepen their relationships and really unlock the full value of their fan base um i'm thinking that in the flip side as well how can we also like bring it open it up for fans to basically get closer to the creators when you know as their time is valued as well and their their engagement is valued so like lens could potentially enable creators to engage with their fans in any way they want and really get a 360 view of their fan base of their followers maybe giving options to engage um or to build connections that otherwise might not be possible so i have some just ideas what if creators could really get reports and breakdowns on who their fans are who's consuming the most content what they love what they like who are they from get a sort of holistic view of everyone that's involved and then maybe on a recognition point like what if creators could even recognize individual fans with rewards perks personal experiences maybe and gifts perhaps even some direct contact as a way to sort of thank them for that support and show them that they're a valued fan but then onto monetization over to you simon yeah yeah yeah so um yeah this one's really about monetization commercializing content and um uh you know this is something that i think bugs a lot of creators today and it's very difficult to find a a way to have a viable sustainable living on on webtoons or social media um you know there's always a few issues at play i mean platforms take a large cut of any profits you make anyway um but also creators aren't always just free to focus on their content because they have to worry about how do they beat the algorithm you know how do they climb higher in the rankings in order to kind of better position themselves to monetize um their content and while also having to you know maintain towards community guidelines or guidelines and rules set by the platforms which seem to be ever changing so it's it's a sort of frustrating loop that i think a lot of creators get stuck in so really it sort of feels that um it's a system in which there are limits to the freedom uh of how you might sort of thrive both financially and and creatively so you know one question we're thinking about for for lens and uh what it could imply for creators is it's really like what if you could release some of that pressure you know and what if you could put more control and better tools back into the hands of creators and how they commercialize their content so they can both thrive financially and and creatively so you know um obviously with nfts and sort of the boom there like creating content on chain is gonna enable new forms of monetization uh different systems and and also the way uh that could be tuned and targeted towards different audiences um also it kind of lowers the barrier for new creators to enter the system they don't have to fulfill you know minimum audience sizes and things like that to kind of actually participate and actually enjoy some revenue from their work um so a couple of ideas here like one of them is this idea of a dashboard right so monetization dashboard you know what if it was easy and simple for folks to um automate or configure different options or systems by which to monetize their content so in the sketch you can kind of see you know maybe it's an ad model the traditional admiral model that i switch on and a match made to brands uh perhaps it's pay-per-view or sort of surge pricing or even subscription and on the right you know perhaps i can just customize each post in different ways for for different audiences maybe there's members i have or early bloomers or just like what is it for everyone else um but also you know beyond this too you know with content sort of minted sort of released on chain i mean um we're also imagining tools that can track content across apps built on lens so that creators can you know monitor and track and receive income or royalties for or attributions for any content that's used by other creators on on lens apps and then the middle idea here is around membership right so um obviously we're seeing this in different forms on on certain platforms like patreon uh etc but um you know what if creators could design their own membership programs and where they define the tiers of access and different perks and rewards that their different audiences might have and um also can they even pull in their audiences or their top fans in into their into their kind of orbit and actually help them grow and incentivize those fans and audiences in different ways with financial rewards or tokens so tons and tons of opportunities as it comes to uh monetization um and then now sort of back over to rich for a little bit on dowels yeah i hope everyone's clinging onto their seat in this avalanche of ideas but we're getting there but um yeah on to dows because thousand collectors they're like integral to the the way of thinking even their density really of this sort of web 3 social world but often times the tooling and front ends that we work with today they're they're you know they're they're uh limited uh you know for for individual use um or potentially even the ones are sort of there's less of a social aspect to them it's more about sort of the hard financials or the governance as as we heard earlier we've been thinking a little bit about how does um can have a sort of collective presence giving them you know almost like a social soul of their own on the social graph so you give a little bit of a scroll there there we go lovely uh yeah so like social media today really is built for individuals and groups and companies like do have profiles um the user experience is you know still orientated really around an individual person who controls the organization's account or perhaps you know maybe a team in bigger organizations and alike as well and those platforms really are not set up at all for any sort of decentralized or ad-hoc communities that may have you know a range of ways of organizing themselves that it might not fit into these so strict buckets so like what if there was uh different voices in a community could come together under one profile maybe one pop-up ad hoc profile without giving any one person complete control and we kind of have this you know we have multi-sig crypto wallets where we can you know let a group of people follow you know a collective policy for transferring digital assets so how about that for sort of a profile if you like for for managing you know a social presence of a collective yeah what if a community could have a profile and a publication channel with a user interface that really suits its governance style its tools maybe what if you could have pop-up sort of uh communities around these things what if there was like local fans of taqueria in los angeles were able to compete to win the right to post a review under under a shared account and then what if digital native companies could easily distribute control of their social media feed to every single employee so that everyone kind of has an ability to contribute to to the presence on the web and if you give us another scroll there um yeah we've got a sort of sense of how you can make decisions about identity uh but how do we sort of get a sense of the members beyond just uh you know a pseudo-anonymous address and those have become obviously significant organizational structures in the web through space bringing in completely new ways of organizing communities treasuries voting on change distributing funds but you know they're focused on right now maybe enabling the sort of the financials and the operations and they're becoming increasingly harder to manage uh and they're becoming very fragmented and siloed across lots of different platforms like we all know the discord problem uh so what if tires were built on a suite of tools that really helped to integrate not just governance and finance but also a sense of identity and a sense of community and communication and those onshore tools for they're you know they're typically centered around the voting and finance like i mentioned and they're uh by default sort of pseudo-anonymous with no identity no sort of social presence um attached to any sort of voting or anything but what if you introduce sort of social connections to individuals and content represented on chain then tools can expand to include that social and productivity features that otherwise you know would exist you know completely off chain in other different silos so one of those at a dashboard for members that automatically showed the collective interests maybe the authorship and the favorite content of its members what if those had a set tools that enabled them to have one view of their operation their communications solving that discord problem and what if those uh had more elaborate voting systems based on group membership allowing some communities to run in sort of representative manners perhaps with boards of committees empowered to make certain decisions alone we just opened uh opened three sort of boxes just now but there's a lot more to explore and i'm gonna bring it over to ramon to take us home with the wild card section thank you so that that went broad um so we talked about kind of like the idea of like an open social graph and how empowering that can be we talked about kind of like building potential new lens tooling that kind of like helps expand the ecosystem system itself we talked about kind of like the idea the ideas or concepts that kind of like to to evolve to create the economy itself and we kind of like we know that dao tooling is a huge emergent space that needs a lot kind of that that is growing and thriving right now and uh needs this social character so kind of with those things one thing where we wanted to end with or go now is like looking a little bit more and like how could this manifest itself into front-end experiences or looking into that space and so we have a couple of sections here that we want to run through through a little bit to just inspire you to kind of like see how the world is already super social but it can can now like where we can hopefully now put a web-free twist on it or make it more web-free native and a big belief we we have a big belief that music isn't inherently social we go to concerts we share playlists we have a deep connection to artists themselves and like we want to like like we want to get like be connected to them we often are more willing to pay to an individual artist a significant amount than to to kind of like to a service so kind of like how can we rethink the relationship between an artist and uh us and create novel music platforms that take this with free mentality of ownership and relationship together and kind of like build new uh primitives uh that are like enable new things to do there i think it's also going there with uh with the the gaming world that is social by default right it doesn't matter if you play alone together in with others around you in in a in a game like fortnite roblox or all of this but like those game become more alive if they're if there are real people around you that you can interact with but gaming is not just inside a game it's like the whole world of of twitch discord all of this this kind of like economies and worlds around games itself that like even in this even in this chat right now we have a chat going on on the side where we have a conversation going on and that we use the prompts to bring it into our live conversation right now here so kind of like how can we move from those very broadcasting tools to kind of like more interactive elements and conversations and like that that bring multiple worlds together in novel ways so so one way is like how can we how can play be even more social like what would it be to build the uh ios game center on top of lines to easily find friends to play against with like we all probably had our wordle moment in the last couple of weeks where we just kind of like also loved to show up how good we were on twitter or not as me but like the idea is kind of like we love those connections we love to compete we love to kind of like like challenge our friends and like a lot of this kind of gaming is super social so but right now it's locked into specific world so can can we do this even make more social and what this makes me also super interested about is like i spent way too much time building up my gta 5 character in gta online and like that is a part of my identity too what if an online an in-game character has its own social graph too and how can we build those world around that one thing that we haven't touched yet but like we want to go back is yes we talk a lot about lens tooling and like dao tools and all of this but like e-commerce is one of the prime reasons the internet exists and thrives and grows and like what we know from history is that wherever you establish a market a community will build around it no matter if it was the silk road a marketplace in a in a southern european city that the whole town is coming together to kind of like exchange gossip and news and whatever happens around it like markets build culture right and like even like looking at like the like marketplaces like d-pop or facebook they're in they're extremely social too and i think we can go to the next level like where we can actually see what our friends are up to what our friends are recommending what what they are using right now or not using where we can maybe get early access to it and even like rich was talking about uh rethinking algorithms based on our preferences there's a lot of like ways how we can rethink shopping itself and like let's be honest like instagram turned into one of the greatest shopping malls in all time so like shopping is social so how can we gain the control a little bit more back and like using it for us the other thing is i think we sometimes miss that even the way we work and all of that is social too this talk was created in figma and big chan right that's how how we at least as our team are working it's like you're following other people around in a file and like you're building connections there too so no matter if you use notion github figma or all of those tools even google slides there's a lot of like social elements and moments that we create and i think again it's it's about kind of like making sure that you find your friends that you can create new assets and all of that together that makes it extremely powerful to think about like what does it mean when we have an open graph and we bring it together with the composability of web3 together with the potential new business models that we can think through that come through defy and blockchains and generals to kind of like create like rethink work social gaming and all of that together i want to end with one of my favorite things is like i think we it's easy to get super heavy weighted in those conversations and one of our like favorite ideas that we just want to leak here and show here is like yeah around the ideas of memes and a little bit background here is like for me the when i think about tick tock or all of memes it's like this is web-free culture like someone creates an expression and others start to build on it like memes are composable by default like that's how they work right we're building on top of each other and it creates this ecosystem of reactions and interactions and evolutions and all of those like they grow and like so one thing that we start to think about and even like just kind of like how can we build a social network just around memes and i think that just sure that for us shows um the actual power of lens itself right we can we could build the next evolution of apple music or spotify we can lean into it building a social network but it can be as small or nerdy as just a forkable meme creator on chain that kind of like shows you to build how your memes are spreading and evolving over time and like that that for me makes this super interesting so to kind of like summarize where we ended with our thing is like we we started with that a social graph we really just kind of like at the tip of an iceberg here right we talked about it's really about empowering you us ourselves it's about kind of like that this is bigger than twitter and facebook and covers other things and it's really about expanding what lens can be from visualizing our networks to rethinking about how we label things and organizing it through better algorithm it's about kind of like better matching between creators more insights from our relationships between our fans and audiences a new business model and also kind of like the whole aspect of community itself so this was a lot of talking from our side and we hoped that we at least could bring up the iceberg a little bit and like show a little bit more potential of like how big this opportunity actually is especially when we start to cross-connect the services that we build on top of it all together um i do think we have a couple of audience questions so i think that's a perfect moment to kind of like close this uh conversation and like hear what are some questions so let's freaking build this together awesome well thank you so much for uh going through that amazing talk and um with so many amazing comments and how well kind of thought out everything that you talked about is as well as uh just overall the the detail the attention you put into uh preparing this so it was super insightful so the few questions i want to ask and that we'll kind of go to as many as we can uh until we kind of run out of time but uh i i guess so the first kind of question that comes in is from kind of your perspective having been on both sides like what do you think is a difference between being a designer what too and and now what three like are there any specific things that stand out or can how do you assess or contrast both i i can't take this one i think like on a crafts level it's not that much a difference but what is different is that you have to think more about building for a community building with others you have to appreciate that everything is composable like if you design a brand it's about you have to embrace memes and that others will take the brand further so it's a lot about giving control away and like and enabling others so i think on that one on a product design lens i think the reality is that we have to acknowledge we are still in a super early nerdy stage it's very technical often you you have to understand some of the smart contracts fundamentals to kind of like like especially in the more complicated like defy areas to kind of like really push what design can do and the reality is i think there's just not as many of us designers out there so you can't find that great inspiration first so we need to find more of us to really push what design can do in this field absolutely and if anyone else wants to add something feel free to go for it i'll move on to the next question all right cool i'll do the next one so uh kind of the other piece is uh you talked about uh essentially kind of how do you present information and and what will be a good thing about how lens can make that easier but um what would you imagine sort of like the user ends up feeling uh and uh so let's try to read this so how do you imagine the users might feel different when interacting with the web through based social media network um like what kind of different emotions would they do you think they might experience compared to the current social uh kind of norms or just networks out there and do you think this is a different emotive experience too or is it just a different way of thinking about where the data is and who controls it at the end of the day and it's a bit of an abstract question but that that is a great question and i don't think it's one that we'll know the answer to until we start to build stuff right and we start to put things in front of people engage reactions um but ultimately i think it's hopefully we'll be evoking an interesting reaction that the whole sense of ownership really is is what a huge piece is here and hopefully a sense of i guess um i guess a lot of trust has been degraded from some of the sort of bigger centralized or social media providers and i'm curious to see uh anna at least from from research that i've done on other projects but how uh how folk are sort of perceiving those current uh social media providers now versus sort of the newer ones which are decentralized by default and sort of you know have a lot of sort of trustless stuff baked in as well so i think lots just lots to see but hopefully um a little bit of interesting stuff against the backlash of the centralized incumbents i i think two things to add like i i really think the the fact that you own your content and you're in control of it and you can decide what happens with it will change quite a bit how we think about what how we create content what content will be created and how content is curated i think we haven't touched that space enough that creators are important curators are the next big thing the other thing is like i actually think rage quitting will be a superpower as like we're in the sense of like if your data is portable and you're in control you actually like rage quit is actually something that can be a force for good right where like where if someone builds a better user experience a better way to moderate the content as you wanted to see that has better privacy section it's not like you're locked into a system you quit and move over and i think that hopefully creates a lot of new competition and innovation of like actually exploring what this world even can be yeah a big plus one to that a lot of stuff that we heard from lee stanley and velaji earlier around this idea of like a race to create the best front end the most novel the most interesting and hopefully that's just going to drive a great user experience which we're all excited about great and uh the final audience question i want to ask and then we can uh get to the next talk is um how do you feel about the real-time distributed collaboration sort of world in web3 do you think that's going to be interactive like would be like this this call we're in um or do you think that's more on kind of the broadcasting side where we're like uh twitch where people just kind of consuming what somebody's doing but it's not really interactive honestly i think that the reality is uh covet and corona the pandemic changed the way how we think about collaborating together right i was at ideo before and post-its were my life and now i haven't touched the post-it for two years and like i do this all through through figma and it changed the way we work before that i couldn't imagine it and like the technology might sometimes still buggy not there but like i think real-time async we find new ways and we we use it in appropriate ways right sometimes we want to lean back and just enjoy twitch and sometimes i actually would love to kind of like be the annoying person on the side that can actually influence as an audience twitch for the ones i'm watching playing and like i think there will be new forms of interaction that can be enabled through those things and like it's probably like it's not a or b it's a gradient of things that we are enabling here absolutely well simon rich thank you so much for that amazing uh talk and um this was great so thank you so much thank you bye [Music] [Applause] [Music] you