Recent actions in Brazil towards x shows that social platforms will have hard time to establish resiliency for freedom of speech or to thrive as fair and open social spaces.

Eventually x would need to take down accounts that are unlawful for whatever legal decision or interpretation of the law. This also means that politized judgements or interpretations of the law can become a reason to take down opinionated accounts.

There are lot of cases in history where the law or court judgements have been used as a political tool.

A way to enable open and fair social spaces would be by relying on a network that can ensure data integrity for social data (accounts, followers, content). If a node does not respect the data integrity, it gets disqualified and removed. New nodes will appear due to the cryptoeconomic incentives.

Thats why I am also bearish on existing federated data models since there are little incentives to establish data integrity. Nodes can be paid to run these servers to serve data and “to be nice” but without a consensus, there is no guarantee for data integrity.

Once there is a consensus over data integrity, social primitives can be established and ownership rights issued to private/public key holders of the network participants. Virtually Bitcoin relies on the same mechanism for establishing ownership guarantees over a financial primitive.

This is why I am bullish on using onchain for providing security to ensure data integrity and ownership that eventually can enable censorship resistance. Moderation would still work on an application/platform level without seizing users accounts and voice on protocol level.

It’s a fundamental transition from don’t be evil to can’t be evil.

Custom modules and frames will take Lens to new heights, however there are several factors currently holding them back. Let's explore:

Problem:

Currently, the biggest limitation of modules is frontend composability. App diversity is one of the greatest strengths of Lens, but also creates a challenge for developers. Each module may need to be individually supported across every Lens app.

Existing frame standards have limited capabilities to capture social context of transactions, and rely on trusting URLs to return transaction data. These factors affect the potential use cases and security of transaction frames.

Solution:

Frames solve the frontend composability of modules by allowing developers to create a single frontend to interact with a module, and have it embedded across multiple apps.

Lens modules can improve the transaction capabilities of frames by allowing developers to easily customize behavior based on the social context of an action. Creators, mirrors, comments, followers, apps, and more can all be attributed within a module transaction. Modules also embed contract addresses and calldata directly into social primitives, allowing apps to verify the intent of a creator and curate transaction frames with greater certainty.

Execution:

I’m currently putting the finishing touches on an LIP to combine these primitives and change the game.

Modules have the potential to create new incentive structures to distribute and interact with content:

1. Perform actions such as voting, NFT minting, DeFi protocol actions, and offchain actions such as e-commerce using oracles

2. Attach incentives to perform actions and promote content through referral fees or bounties (if profiles matching <insert condition> mirrors this post, the profile and app where it is executed receives <insert incentive>)

Combine and you have a set of tools with tremendous potential to create new types of content, apps, products, and marketing campaigns.

The future of social media and finance is onchain, and it’s coming quickly.