Yesterday Lens Protocol announced the CultivatorDAO (👩‍🌾,👨‍🌾) to establish community driven content curation for Trust & Safety. Going to share our vision below on how we see the web3 social stack evolve 🧵

First, Lens Protocol is a decentralized social media protocol that acts as a registry to point content and followers. Users can link to any content which can be stored on-chain & off-chain. Most of the content is off-chain (stored in IPFS or Arweave etc).

The Protocol is flexible enough to link the content even to a private cloud or to a self-hosted environment. This is an interesting use case for follower and token gated content. It's up to the applications and users to choose how they use Lens Protocol.

Lens Protocol design guarantees users the access to their own social network. You don't need to trust centralized or off-chain platforms with your followers. Meaning every user has their own social network.

Not only you own your own network, but you also have the ability to broadcast content in a permissionless and censorship resistant way. Anyone you grant the access to your content has the ability to explore your creativity and self expression. This is decentralization by design.

While decentralization is groundbreaking for web3 social, the amount of information and finding relevant peers and content for you to discover would be a time consuming mission. This reason is why we would see another stack evolve - the middleware - where curation lives.

The middleware layer already exists on Lens Protocol, there are tools such as Graph Protocol, RSS3, Sepana and the Lens API. The middleware layer consists from widely decentralized appoaches to being progressively decentralized depending on the use cases they serve.

The latest addition to the middleware are communities such as the CultivatorDAO, focusing on curation with Trust & Safety in mind. Where code cannot solve everything, we need communities to reflect their values and govern.

The DAOs of the Lensverse will serve the application layer for various tasks ranging from building discovery algorithms, content moderation and solving various challenges that social media faces today.

The key difference between the web2 and web3 social stack is that in web3, the stack is completely open. When you don't like a policy or an experience, as a user you should be able to find a new experience without leaving behind your accumulated social capital.

Hopefully we will see small communities evolve across the web3 social ecosystem, being utilized for tasks that would benefit from community governance.

I would even imagine that every social media application built on top of Lens Protocol would have its own DAO consisting of its community members voted by the community that reflects the their own values.

Most importantly, these DAOs can operate transparently and since the measures taken by these DAOs are public, there should not be any shadow banning (see here: lenster.xyz/posts/0x05-0x0417)..)

By ensuring human assessment and the design that leads to decentralization, we are able to ensure that web3 social doesn't become a closed platform and users are able to access to open social networks that are driven by community engagement & stewardship.

Building a decentralized stack is a harder exercise than starting from a centralized approach, but brings the benefit of fully verified content linking on-chain wherever you store your content, ownership to your social graph, ability to use timestamps and create programmability.

And most importantly: decentralized and on-chain content and follower registries opens up the programmability and composability to another level. Imagine pairing Lens with tools like Simo, Lit Protocol, DeFi, NFTs, ReFi and DAO governance.

Besides reachitecturing the social stack, part of the mission for the Lens team is to make the social stack more accessible. Now with all interactions across the Lens Protocol, users do not need to sign or pay any gas. Blockchain on the backend, party on the frontend 🥳

Next Monday, you will be able to vote for CultivatorDAO with your Lens Profile to signal your support for community driven stewardship snapshot.org/#/cultivatordao.eth/proposal/0xd512345eb6c9b7bbf57b28a8b4f7dc46d31ab6c19ac8ad5de4605fa52fcb9e98

If you love our vision and what we are building, collect and mirror this post to retain your early user flexing rights 🌿