Open data, but also open-ended links?
One of the main promises of web3 is "open data", meaning something like: the data is published on permissionless, decentralized data storages (preferably with plenty of documentation on the data format, to help others easily parse it), rather than a database running on a proprietary server.
I think maybe there's another sense of "open data" that might be important: representing links between pieces of data (e.g. "this comment is in reply to that post") using a platform-agnostic/open-ended/extensible link format, rather than using links that are hardwired so that they can only point to other data on the same platform (causing network lock-in).
That is: if you're creating a social-media platform that has some notion of "replying" or "linking" or "retweeting" or whatever, maybe don't restrict it to only being able to say "this comment is in reply to post #123 by User X (of this platform)"; give it a way to say "this comment is in reply to post #123 by User X on That Other Platform Over There".
(Um, or just use a URL? I feel like that's not quite the right level of abstraction, but maybe it works okay?)
This seems to be the design philosophy behind Multiformats, though they seem to be focusing on lower-level protocols (for now?).
This might help us establish a combined network effect, allowing many web3 social-media projects to "join forces" to compete with the already-huge network effect of the web2 social-media incumbents like Twitter and Facebook.
Posted Dec 29, 2021, 5:28 PM UTC · edited
From your post, I understand there are two major problems:
Twitter allows you to share links to other platforms, but URLs don't have the properties we want (level of abstraction, metadata, hashed content, tracking of origin, ...).
Incentives Problem: Twitter wants to keep users in their UI.
The solution to 1) is a technical one. You mention Multiformats, which is used by IPFS.
And the solution to 2) would need experimenting with reward mechanisms alternative to online ads, to support a potential new platform built on IPFS.
Yes! And of course alternative-reward-mechanisms is something that web3 ought to be great at. Imagine every creator having a token, maybe every post having a token, etc.
e.g. I keep thinking that "every post should have its own token" turns social-media posts into candidates for retroactive public-goods funding. (If you think a post/video is awesome and will earn a lot of future donations, maybe you buy some of its token from the content creator, which gives the creator some guaranteed up-front revenue while you take on some of the risk/reward. That is: content tokens would allow you to be an investor in a piece of social-media content.)
Combine mechanisms like that with the shared network effect idea, and maybe we'd have a social-network where network lock-in doesn't make as much sense. Rather than a miniscule long-shot chance at becoming Facebook or Twitter and getting massively rich (with the much-more-likely result of failing to take off at all), you settle for getting to participate and share in the profits of this process of collaboratively building this combined network. Using an open-ended link format allows us to attract more people/projects/platforms into helping us build a network effect.