Despite the recent buzz around the decentralized social media application Friend tech, industry leaders argue that there is still much work to be done and many challenges to overcome in order to attract and retain users on the platform.
A Boring and Expensive Platform
Ed Moss, Growth Manager at Layer-1 blockchain firm DeSo, stated that the process of buying cryptocurrencies from an exchange, transferring them to a wallet with a bulky Chrome extension, and then paying high gas fees to transact on-chain or across chains is boring and expensive for first-time users.
“We’ve seen that 99% of mainstream users would drop off at this initial step, so simplifying this flow is critically important.”
However, according to Suhail Kakar, the creator of the DeSo application Onboard, the problems can start even before this point. Kakar explained that users are often hesitant to take the first step because they need to have knowledge about blockchain, smart contracts, and wallets before signing up. Kakar stated that building communities for DeSo applications requires more time because showcasing oneself in these applications is like “going to a party where you don’t know anyone.” According to Kakar, this can be a turning point as more high-level content creators and influencers join the platform, as users will ultimately follow where high-quality content goes.
A Different Network Design for Platforms
Data from April shows that Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have approximately 2.98 billion, 2 billion, and 372.9 million monthly active users respectively. In contrast, Odysee, one of the most visited decentralized social media networks, had only around 5.3 million average monthly unique users between January and April, according to CoinGecko.
Moss argues that another reason decentralized social media fails to reach the masses is that platforms like Ethereum and other smart contract platforms are not specifically designed to provide social media applications on a large scale.
He revealed that the ideal solution is to design a “storage-heavy” or “stateful” blockchain network that can store and index actions such as “posts,” “likes,” “follows,” “comments,” and “social graphs” directly on the chain, enabling true decentralization without relying on any corporate entity or central authority:
“A social application needs this in order to enable true decentralization, where end users actually own their content, identities, and social graphs.”
According to CoinGecko, Friend tech has attracted over 85,000 users from more than 127,000 wallets and has received over 630,000 collective requests since its launch earlier this month.
According to Future Markets Insights, sales revenue from decentralized social media networks is projected to reach $12.1 billion by 2023 and exceed $101 billion by 2033, indicating a compound annual growth rate of 23.6%. Other decentralized social media networks include Jack Dorsey’s decentralized Twitter alternative Bluesky, Mastodon, and Lens Protocol.
