Interlude

Lens is an open minder.

It's a lens toward my thinking, making me define what is essential for me and not reacting to what happens and the news.

Life on most social media is catching up with what has happened to others and what they are trying to sell.

When I scroll through any of them, I feel overwhelmed by scrolling and trying to elaborate on all this information.

On the contrary, Lens makes me connect with others, create relationships, and be more oriented to interacting and contributing. Here we are buying our shared journey.

So, while on Twitter, I feel in a rush, trying not to be left behind. Here I am happy to connect with creators and discover new content at my own pace.

Yo.

Were you waiting for a new episode?

Share some love if you were because here, something big is happening.

We have a new episode of the Lens 🌿 vs Twitter - a saga 🚨🚨🚨

This one is about the first days of Elon at Twitter.

It's a story. Maybe a dream, and we have to wake up.

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Chapter 1: The GOAT... 🐐

1.2 First days.

So, the day arrived, and Elon was just there. ⛹️

He arrived so excited as a boy on the first day of school. 🎒

Disclaimer: he did and will do so many things in the next few weeks that it would be hard to track what he did and will do.

No, I lied. Sorry for that. 🙇

Elon was there even before the day arrived. 😄 He couldn't wait for the deadline to close the deal, so he paid to enter Twitter HQ in San Francisco.

But he didn't enter like any normal human being. He went there with a sink and tweeted: Entering Twitter HQ – let that sink in!

What a meme!

A week and a half after doing this, he started with his first fantastic business idea. He is a never-ending business ideas generator. Take notes and copy. Some of them should be good ones. This is a fact!

The first one was: let's make every profile eligible for a verification check mark. Only requirement: pay $8 a month. Power to the people!

It went great. For a couple of minutes. 😸

People started to impersonate brands and celebrities, creating confusion.

A mess. So, he stopped it. But it was just the beginning.

After that, he thought about a dozen ways to make money with Twitter.

Some of them:

Paywalled creator videos (this should come from the Lens community 😃).

Grey verification checkmarks.

He decided to scare employees with the fear of bankruptcy.

Firing half of them with an email.

Closing the offices while employees while a large number of employees were resigning.

Unbanning Donald Trump. Receiving zero interest from him.

He decided to add Blue, Grey, and Gold verification badges.

So what's the plan?

Big announcements that are just discarded the day after.

Still determining if this will work, but at least there is a considerable commitment and a high intensity of actions taken.

Let's see if a part of the company will follow his vision and make this possible.

Let me judge this just for a second. ✨✨✨

I know I shouldn't, but...

Hey, this is an unpredictable saga. 😵‍💫

Hey Elon, please listen. Tactics are not what we want here. We want a strategy.

But even if you know how to make this happen. Your resume says it. Please, remember to be human.

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Ready for 1.3. Twitter madness?

If so. LMCC and share some love.

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Are you reading this? Let me know by making a joke in your comment 🏖️

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See you soon, Lens folks.

Here we have a new episode of

Lens 🌿 vs Twitter - a saga 🚨🚨🚨

Chapter 1: The GOAT... 🐐

1.0 Mysteries

A lot of drama is coming... 🔥🔥🔥

Take a breath and enjoy the story... if you missed the previous episodes, look for them in this post.

If you like this episode, share some love ✅

Let's go

👇👇👇

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So, what's going on with Elon?

What is his goal, and what drives him?

Why did he buy Twitter, and how did he do it?

Why did the Twitter execs sell to him?

When I heard about the deal, I believed the guy was bluffing when he said he would buy the Bird.

Everything looked so counterintuitive that I believed he was trying to get some press to supplement his popularity and fame.

But eventually, I have to admit, I was wrong.

I believed the guy was trying to leverage a situation by being a sneaky calculator while he was just a caterpillar. He is THE caterpillar.

So, why did he do it?

After some thought, my take is that he feels that Twitter is a potent tool that has enabled him to build incredible power and huge personal branding.

So he just realized that Twitter is like a megaphone that can amplify his voice.

But if this is true for him, it is valid for everyone. So, many people would be willing to pay to use such a tool.

Companies will pay to use the tool for marketing and connecting with their actual and potential customers. Also, celebrities, politicians, and many more people would be interested in paying for Twitter services if they could enhance their connection with followers.

So, Musk saw dollars.

How was it possible for the deal to happen?

Elon just made an offer that Twitter couldn't refuse by paying a premium over the previous valuation and threatened to review his position as a stakeholder if they didn't accept the deal.

Another time, he was using brute force.

So, Elon did the Elon thing. 👍👍

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Ready for the next paragraph?

Coming soon, it will be 1.2 First days.

Chapter 0 - Introduction

0.3 Enters Lens

This is the part of the story where our hero 🦸 appears.

Goofy, nerd, and a bit weird, but with a good heart and a promising future.

Enters Lens 🌿.

Lens had a noble goal: make the opposite social media were doing.

That thing was being open, so while the others were building walls, Lens decided to build bridges.

Lens's goal is to create a compostable and decentralized social graph that can be used and leveraged by apps that share it, becoming a community-based product and not a community exploiter product.

Before Lens, if you wanted to build a social product, you needed to raise a massive amount of money to compete with the big guys.

Innovation was limited to the enormous competitive advantage these companies have created over time.

Pitching a social media idea was a meme, and competing with the top ones was considered impossible.

This is because social media, like other products, had the infamous chicken-egg problem.

Users wanted to use them if they were engaging, but they needed a lot of users to be attractive.

So starting one required a lot of capital to generate the initial, relevant mass of users/content needed to succeed.

With Lens, this becomes untrue.

An app that uses Lens doesn't need to worry about onboarding users because it comes with the decentralized Lens social graph.

Lens fosters innovation, so developers like Yoginth 🧑‍💻 and others 👩‍💻🧑🏽‍💻👩🏻‍💻🧑‍💻 can initiate a product like Lenster with minimal investment and get good metrics without crazy marketing.

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But this is just the beginning of this story 👽👽👽

Collect 📮 and mirror 🪞 this post and be ready for Chapter 1: The GOAT...

0.2 Social media

Social media was a genius move.

Creating platforms in which everybody could build his network and reputation, reach friends, and make new ones, was the thing in early 2000.

Companies like Facebook 📘, Twitter 🐦, Friendster 😟, and Myspace 😵 have entirely changed how we communicate and have made possible a lot of new ways of interacting.

Most of them were exploiting the Social Graph: a graph representing social relations between entities.

So they were mapping all connections to represent in a database real-life relations.

Some became huge companies over a couple of decades, and some were disasters.

But while allowing people to connect and share, some of these organizations created evil patterns, sucking away people's time and collecting their information to cluster and categorize interests, passions, sins, needs, and much more from every user.

These platforms using your data and some AI/ML became the best tracking tool in the world.

And they provided brands with a platform to leverage this immensely precious data to sell incredibly efficient advertisements.

Users were the product itself.

Too good to be true for marketing departments.

Twitter has become the most important and relevant social media, at least the one that sets most of the trends.

But Twitter was one the worst monetizers ever. Not able to leverage the enormous traffic to the level reached by other players.

Twitter's annual revenue in 2021 was $5.08 billion, while Facebook's revenue was $117.9 billion.

Now Facebook is facing some issues, but this is another story.

So, Elon now wants to make Twitter pay his dividends.

In his vision, he has an untapped market inside a product and company that can become a financial blessing for him and his investors.

Will he succeed? Who knows.

Plot twist ⚠️⚠️⚠️

But now, it arrives our hero.

Enters the scene Lens 🌿, a composable and decentralized social graph that can be the enabler of the next generation of social media...

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Want to know more? 👽👽👽

Collect 📮 and mirror 🪞 this post and wait for 0.3.

Chapter 0 - Introduction

0.1 The two guys

A few weeks ago, Elon Musk started taking his place as a Chief Revolution Officer at Twitter.

His only goal: making Twitter the most profitable media company ever.

What did he find there? An unprofitable business with high expenses in an already slowing down tech economy.

What did he start doing? Cutting heads to reduce expenses from day zero.

Just a few days later, Yoginth, a developer who was unknown to the majority of the industry just a few months ago, quit his job and went all in on building Lenster.

This social platform aims to be a Twitter competitor. This unknown guy raised a few thousand bucks from his supporters, leveraging another time the users of his product for the better.

It is the story of these two guys and many more people.

It is the story of what can have been, what is, and what will be.