The emerging onchain social stack: a new design space

Native social interactions are a new trend taking shape in Crypto. Similar to what happened during DeFi summer, people are starting to mix and match social protocols: using their inherent composability to stack them one on top of the other, to leverage the social network of one protocol with the features and onchain interactions enabled by another, and so on.

What is this onchain social stack exactly and how is it improving the open Web?

👩‍🏫 What?

-Objective identity (i.e., with global consensus)
-Portable social graphs (i.e., take your connections with you, anywhere)
-P2P storage networks with content addressing (i.e., harder to attack, more efficient…)
-Sufficiently decentralized social media (e.g., Farcaster and Lens).
-A standard for sharing permissionless social spaces with app builders: Frames and Open Actions
-Open source apps with universal backends (smart contracts) that are easily pluggable into people's social feeds and preferred UIs. (e,g., Fileverse collaboration Smart Contracts)
-Multiple UIs that cater to the same protocol but offer uniquely different experiences, affordances and even content moderation.

👩‍🔬 Why?

These components, if combined correctly, give place to a new permissionless design space for developers and users alike.

-Non-zero-sum user acquisition for different dApps. E.g., a weekly-active-user (WAU) on Warpcast can S I M U L T A N E O U S L Y be a WAU on 3 other dApps that are natively accessible on Warpcast via Frames.

-Frictionless browsing on the Internet. Web2 social apps compete with each other to maximise their share of people's attention. This leads to monopolistic behaviour, walled-gardens and terrible multi-app UX for people.

If you want to read an article or check an app out that someone shared on your favourite social feed, you need to click on an unknown link, open a new tab, load a new page, identify yourself on the new app (often complex account sign up), leading to friction all the way from someone seeing a link on their feed to actually checking it out.

-Right to exit any app/dApps by taking your personal data with you (e.g. social graph). Anybody can build anything while tapping into a publicly accessible social pool. Effect multiplier through inter-protocols/apps-cooperation (i.e. working together despite having different goals). Easier adoption.

-Customizeability of UX/UI for users seeking a highly catered experience.

Enabling the much-needed non-financial, useful activities in crypto.

👩‍🏭 How?

Fileverse was early in cross-dApps social experiments, see 3 examples bellow:

#1 Collapsing online, onchain and IRL into one during ETHDenver.

In a 7 days sprint ETHDenver we built a dApp with interactive details about the conference, speakers, and sessions. We were able to leverage 12+ protocols and dApps for this mobile dApp. Stacking up the Legos, one on top of another to create a seamless experience for users.

Attendees could show support to speakers in just a click by sending them 'love' NFTs onchain. Each speaker profile could be shared natively on Farcaster via a Frame or on Lens via Open Actions.

That meant that by sharing a profile, people would automatically create a mini-app on a Farcaster/Lens, with embedded images and onchain interactions.

For example: Almost all top-ranked speakers on our leaderboard, out of over 250, were featured in a Frame on Warpcast or an OpenAction on Hey.xyz

-dApp: https://ethdenver.fileverse.io
-Frame: https://warpcast.com/miroyato/0xbbdb4ece
-OpenAction: https://hey.xyz/posts/0x8e-0x0cdb-DA-8ec3208d

#2 One of our first tests was putting Paul Dylan-Enis' amazing book "The Absolute Essentials of Ethereum" on IPFS/Arweave and Fileverse, that same content onchain on Gnosis Chain, and a Frame on Warpcast that would allow Warpcast users to see and read the book directly from their feed.

By reading the book, people would also mint HeartBits, a provable measure of time reading the book, on Base by interacting with a Safe smart account that would mint on their behalf.

#3 See also latest experimentation, One Piece 🏴‍☠️ manga frame: https://warpcast.com/miroyato/0x2b355596

You're still early!

Next months, we'll be accelerating our experiments with core Fileverse functionalities: collaborative writing, sketching, personal decentralized webpages, file-sharing...

Our goal is to make the onchain world full of daily, non-financial, useful activities and opportunities for the crypto people, crypto-curious peers, and beyond.

👀