Hello Team !
So I was exploring the idea of decentralized social media, found DeSo and Lens protocol.
Wanted to know your thoughts on them. Do you see them as competition ?
Love the work you guys are doing,
Thank You !
1 Like
Hi,
I’m not really involved in project liberty, I’m developing other things in blockchain but I’ve found this project. (Just to put in context my comment)
About DeSo I found two things :
- A js library : hub.deso/#/main/welcome (.org) installed by
npm i deso-protocol; - A blockchain (deso-chain) DeSo: The Decentralized Social Network - DeSo, I think that’s a lightpaper in a nice README format. I haven’t read the entire README but it’s seems well-detailed. A chain can be, indeed, a good solution to offer a tooling centralisation and social ecosystem but there is a problem. Today there is a bad cross-chain communication and apparently we have to wait layer-3 to have this fluent communication.
By this observation, the library seems to be the most interesting and usable tool of DeSo ; but it’s really just my opinion ! Not a judgement on the chain and tools purpose by DeSo.
About Lens, a good point it’s develop on polygon ; and rather than DeSo which has created a chain, Lens has used polygon (/Ethereum) standard Overview. A really personal bad point for me, it’s the strong communication about green, nature, plant,… . It seems too much to be real ; and that stop myself a bit.
Something interesting it’s this polygonscan/address/0xb05BAe098D2b0E3048DE27F1931E50b0200a043B#code (.com) the code of smart contracts. It allows all of us to reuse them in other context and we have smart contracts for a social platform especially to use solidity contract to interact together in social context (and not just in money or exchange context). It creates new thoughts and new possibilities in EVM-compatible environnement. For example, with this I can develop social interactions on avalanche chain, or on Aurora. All of this create new environnement and so it can be very useful for on-chain interactions.
As a conclusion for the liberty project it can help to determine itself between solidity contracts (Lens protocol) and new chain (DeSo). If I have well understand, project liberty is develop on Polkadot which is a different ecosystem than polygon (solidity/EVM) and it will not create new chain but Parachain, which are inherently cross-chain and so it solves the problem of DeSo with inter-chain communication.
P.S. : As a new user I can’t put more than 2 links in my answer so I removed https behind links and ., if you want to click on it please add regular semantic behind links.
3 Likes
DeSo is storing user data on-chain which is a huge design flaw so I personally count it out of the race. Lens is a direct competitor so it’s worth paying attention to.
4 Likes
About DeSo who stored data on-chain I have a more general question. Is it normal (or smart) to store all this type of data on-chain and not only the hash of this ?
Because from my point of view it can create many problems on the node storage and with all the repetition on the blockchain it can explode 
very fast. A priori a blockchain is not a datacenter and with repetitions it can consume too much more space and/or energy to stack all this informations. It’s more an organised set of log/hash.
It’s more a general consideration but it can be interesting to discuss about it.
The problem with storing content on-chain is mainly CSAM and other dangerous materials. Scalability and decentralization are negatively impacted as well, but those are secondary issues in my opinion.
5 Likes
Sorry, What is CSAM ?
It stands for Child Sexual Abuse Materials.
I found it but what the link with on-chain storage ?
Do you mean that can help to store this type of data ?
That’s right, the issue is we do not want links to CSAM and other criminal activity stored in blockchain transactions. Because of the need for consensus, it is exceptionally difficult (in some chains impossible) and undesirable to edit data in transactions. This has already been an issue for other blockchains, people encoding such links in transactions for Bitcoin for example. CSAM is a clear example of content that should be thwarted as much as humanly possible. Other types of “criminal” activity can depend on jurisdiction as to whether they are illegal, and similarly if they are not on chain, then laws can apply to the jurisdiction of whomever is storing the actual content, and its removal would not be damaging to the entire blockchain network. I hope that makes it more clear.
1 Like
Yes definitely you’re right.
In the other hand we can store data which are illegal in certain countries (as in China) but can be very useful. I don’t know some informations hidden by a government, censored in the country. We can think about tor and journalists in certain countries is a very powerful tool and can allow some of them to have access to the information.
But in fact yes it’s a very hard problem and more generally how moderation will be happen on DSN (Decentralise Social Network) is a big challenge.
2 Likes