Building On Lens Protocol - Where to Start?
Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph that enables users and developers of any skill level to own their identity, connections, and content onchain.
Every aspect of Lens can be customized to embed onchain interactions, creating new opportunities to differentiate content and build new incentive structures for participants.
Lens Application Templates
Generate responsive Lens social feed to view profiles and publications:
docs.lens.xyz/docs/scaffold-a-new-lens-app
Lens SDKs
React Hooks, Typescript, and JavaScript libraries to interact with Lens Protocol (follow, post, comment, quote, mirror, collect, and more):
docs.lens.xyz/docs/developer-quickstart
Lens Modules
Modules are smart contract functions that can be executed as a condition or side effect to a social interaction. They can be customized to interact with any smart contract, and properties are inherited by all applications.
Open Actions - Smart contract embeds attached to publications
Examples: Collect, Tipping, Voting
Follow Modules - Attached to follows
Examples: Mint NFT, Pay-to-Follow
References Modules - Attached to quote/comment/mirror
Examples: Mirror Referral Fees, Embed Bounties
docs.lens.xyz/docs/module-interfaces
github.com/lens-protocol/verified-modules
github.com/iPaulPro/scaffold-lenshttps://github.com/iPaulPro/lens-modules
Embed and integrate modules as Open Frames (Coming Soon™️)
LIPs
Lens Protocol is a collection of smart contracts and community standards to facilitate a user-owned social graph. LIPs are the process by which changes are proposed and implemented to the protocol:
Other Tools
lenscan.io - Lens protocol explorer
lenks.xyz - Convert links between Lens applications
Prediction: Open Actions and Reference Modules will lead to an entire ecosystem of Lens native social/meme tokens.
In my opinion, the missing piece to launch this ecosystem is a permisionless way for creators to integrate open actions into Lens apps. Frames/Portals are an interesting step in this direction. I am personally committed to revolutionize the user and developer experience around this.
Lets talk about Opening Up the Garden!
Join us on Buttrfly tomorrow at 12:30PM EST where Stani & the Lens team will be answering questions on LIP-5
One of the biggest challenges in Web3 is balancing composability and risk.
Two recent innovations have opened the door to create novel social experiences while tackling this dilemma.
Lens Open Actions and Farcaster Frames
Open actions are smart contract calls embedded into an on-chain publication.
They enable developers to embed specific contract calls, parameters, revenue models, and logic (token-gating, follow-gating).
The key benefits of embedding an interaction as a smart contract module are provenance and immutability.
Both the creator and executor can explicitly agree to the terms of execution, and these terms can be verified by anyone.
Frames are a way to embed interactive apps into a social feed.
They enable developers to embed an image and buttons into a social feed, and trigger a callback on button press to update the frame.
Some use cases of Frames are polls, games, or relay-sponsored transactions.
Frames provide a rigid way to embed a frontend experience, while delegating the execution to a callback function which can execute anything.
Open actions are essentially the complement to this design: explicitly defined action and open-ended frontend experience.
The beauty of these primitives and Web3 in general is that they can work interoperably.
I envision a world where where publications on Lens and Farcaster can co-exist by referencing and interacting with each other.
One thing is for certain: the future of agreements is on-chain.
Open Actions and Frames comparison: www.notion.so/defispartan/Open-Actions-and-Frames-9f961d4b379a4b899a0b8ca868e5e3a9
- @lens going permissionless
- @farcaster going mainstream
- @talentprotocol V2 launch
- @orbapp launching V2 too
Dude, we are sooooo fucking back! 🚀 2024 will be for Web3 social.
sharing my thoughts from twitter discussion to here!
lens built the most innovative tech stack for building social but not having excellent UX in any of the lens apps was one of the reasons users didn't stick to the apps!
we quite realized this early on and did many user interviews to find out users who stay still found @orbapp decent UX best across all the apps!
but we knew we could easily change this and make it at least 10x better or more, so for the last few months we went back to the building and built the new app from scratch! and i'm super excited to tell you that orb v2 is almost ready and about to launch in the coming weeks!
our major focus in this iteration was proving the excellent ux across the whole web3 social!
can't wait to roll this out already and get your feedback!
thanks to users who did stay and still use the orb every day!
what is this all v2 about 👀
Super cool to see "Smart Tipping" (😏) adopted so quickly! No gas, no middle-man, direct to the creator's wallet.
If you want to integrate post/comment tipping into your Lens app it's really simple! Everything you need can be found here: github.com/mvanhalen/TipActionModule