Compare mainstream decentralized social protocols from the dimensions of identity, data, and storage

Author: 1kx

Compiler: Luffy, Foresight News

Driven by commercial motives, corporate-controlled social media platforms have emerged and greatly undermined initial hopes for a culture of online engagement. Online information technology is supposed to democratize cultural production from the ground up, but today, these profit-driven platforms limit and shape online behavior—“likes” are not a thank you for content, but a tool for commercialization.

Alternative social media platforms built on decentralized technologies and federated protocols reproduce the original vision of online social networking. The data is controlled by the user and recorded in a decentralized database, the front-end is community-driven, the moderation is an expression of the community’s preferences, and the algorithm is chosen by the user. It’s an open source ethos that drives innovation.

History of Decentralized and Alternative Social Media

Before the web became a hub for business, entertainment, and social interaction, it was primarily a tool in the academic and military fields. Tim Berners-Lee developed the first network protocol with an egalitarian vision: the Internet was originally designed to be a decentralized network where information could travel freely between nodes, with no single individual controlling it and no single point of failure.

However, as the commercialization of the web has grown, centralized platforms such as search engines and social media giants have become dominant. While these entities provide tremendous value, they deviate from the original spirit of decentralization, leading to our current Web2 environment.

A key innovation in the development of alternative social networks is the emergence of the concept of federated protocols. A federated network is a system of independent servers or “nodes” that work together to form a social network, as opposed to a centralized platform where an organization controls all servers.

In a federated network system, each server runs software that follows a shared protocol, which enables them to communicate with each other. Users registered on one server can seamlessly follow users on other servers, interact with users on other servers, and share content as if they were on the same platform. Examples of federated protocols include ActivityPub and OStatus, which provide support for federated platforms such as Mastodon and PeerTube.

In the settings of the federated system, users can choose the server they trust, they may migrate to a different server or set up their own, they are given more autonomy. The term “Fediverse” (a portmanteau of “federal” and “cosmos”) is used to describe such a system. Fediverse began with the GNU Social platform and its predecessors (Statusnet and Laconica), but the real turning point was the development and widespread adoption of the ActivityPub protocol, which was published as a recommendation by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) in 2018.

In Web3, once data is ported on-chain, federated social networks are the default state for decentralized systems. The blockchain acts as a back-end server for storing content, and the front-end indexes this content and serves it directly to users. The identity is tied to the public-private key pair that governs the user’s wallet, allowing users to easily verify any data or content they generate. Additionally, the use of on-chain primitives such as NFTs can bundle stored content in metadata and act as a domain name or decentralized identity (DID).

Similar to how ActivityPub works, the Web3 protocol seeks to steer the social graph through authenticated relationships between user nodes. Since any frontend can index and serve this content, there’s stiff competition in the frontend tier, and new features are thriving. In addition, since the data is stored on-chain, users can choose their preferred algorithms, and they can be incentivized to regain the value of their data using certain algorithms. This, combined with more straightforward means of content monetization, provides a better overall experience for creators who have been largely excluded from monetization, even though their content drives demand for these platforms.

Protocol comparison

To truly understand the innovations of decentralized social media protocols, it is necessary to understand the technologies that implement them. It’s worth noting that we’ve not included all social protocols here, but have selected some of the most popular ones:

Identity / Namespace

In federated and decentralized social graphs or network protocols, a “namespace” is a domain where a user identifier or other resource is unique. It is a way to distinguish the resources or identities of one domain/server from another, ensuring that there are no conflicts and ambiguities when integrating or communicating across multiple domains.

The identity and association namespaces of different decentralized social protocols range from simple key pairs (Nostr, Sputlebutt), to URIs pointing to managed profiles (ActivityPub), to using on-chain primitives like NFTs (and more recently, ERC-6551 extensions, such as Lens V2).

Farcaster is a great example of these technologies. A Farcaster account represents a unique entity on the network. Each account has a unique numeric identifier called a Farcaster ID (fid). Identities are managed on-chain using a ETH contract called IdRegistry, where users initiate transactions to obtain new fids. The address that owns the FID is the user’s administrative address. IdRegistry ensures that fids can be transferred between addresses and that no two addresses have the same fid. Farcaster has also extended this namespace to support ENS domain names published on-chain or off-chain. Users must submit proof of signature to the network in order to claim a username.

ActivityPub, on the other hand, identifies each user by a unique URI, usually an HTTPS URL. The URI points to the user’s profile and serves as their global identifier in Fediverse. To make these URIs more user-friendly, many ActivityPub platforms use a system called Webfinger. Webfinger allows users to have an identity similar to “@username@domain.com”.

Lens and CyberConnect manage user profiles as NFTs. In the case of Lens, one user address holds one Profile NFT, and a single address can hold multiple Profile NFTs. Each Profile NFT encapsulates the entire history of the user’s activity. In addition, Profile NFTs have a FollowModule, which is essentially a set of rules that govern how different accounts acquire Follow NFTs. These Follow NFTs record the connection between the account and the profile directly on-chain. There are also handles present that can be created separately from profiles and can be linked from one profile to another or unlinked. Handles exist in their own namespace (e.g. lens/@alice).

Data

Data is arguably the most important feature of decentralized networks, as the creation and standardization of data is the foundation of these systems. The most common technique for managing data here is to use standardized formats such as JSON and common relational objects (e.g., likes, followers). Core data objects typically include:

• Subject & Object: Defined “Subject” (e.g., User) and “Object” (e.g., Post or Message).
• Publications: Posts or comments are packaged as “publications” and are usually linked to external content via URLs.
• Append only what’s in the log: Each entry, whether published or updated, is a log of discrete content items, added and stored sequentially.

Let’s dive into a few examples to see how a particular protocol works.

ActivityPub leverages the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format, a JSON-based data structure, to represent a variety of social interactions, such as posts or likes. The protocol consists of two main components: client-to-server (C2S) and server-to-server (S2S). C2S allows users to interact with their respective servers through client applications. In contrast, S2S facilitates communication between servers, enabling the protocol’s robust federated nature.

In ActivityPub, entities are categorized as “principals” (typically user accounts or groups) and “objects” (content or actions, such as posts or likes). When a subject performs an action on an object, it creates an Active object, such as Create, Follow, or Like.

The Web3 social graph borrows many of the core ideas of ActivityPub but applies them to the blockchain. For example, Lens Protocol introduces “publications”, which encapsulate a variety of user-generated content, such as posts, mirrors, comments, and other forms of media. Each publication is associated with a ContentURI that points to specific content stored on a decentralized protocol such as FIL or Arweave or a centralized storage service such as AWS S3. This design ensures that users’ profiles and all related publications are securely stored in their personal wallets, freeing them from reliance on centralized databases.

Additionally, Web3 offers a more straightforward approach to monetizing user content and influence than Web2 architectures. Users can charge for the minting of Follow NFTs or integrate Collect Modules with their publications. The latter option allows them to charge a fee for NFT minting linked to the ContentURI of their publication. In addition to these features, Lens Protocol also provides a GraphQL API for masking blockchain components from front-end interfaces, providing a more user-friendly experience than previous decentralized social networks.

Eventually, many decentralized social networking protocols create data structures that can only be added and authenticated with user keys. For example, on CyberConnect, each user-centric piece of data is represented as a data stream, where only the data owner is allowed to update. Each update to the data is appended to the datastream as only the commit log is added, and the resulting data structure becomes a hash-linked data structure called a Merkle DAG. Data types include content, favorites, comments, and subscriptions.

Scuttlebutt also uses an add-only log data agency. Each user has their own log, where each new message or action is appended to the end after it is signed by the user. It also supports the sharing of binary data called “blobs”. This data can be images, videos, or any other binary content. Blobs are stored separately from append-only logs, but references (hashes) to those blobs can be included in the logs.

In the case of Farcaster, messages are public updates, such as posting, following, or adding a profile picture, which are encoded as protobuf and must be hashed and signed by the account signer. As long as there is enough storage, users can post messages to the Hub. HUb checks the validity of its signer before accepting each message.

Storage

Data storage in early decentralized protocols was primarily off-chain. For example, Scuttlebutt uses a peer-to-peer gossip network to store data on the user’s local device. This approach ensures data sovereignty as users have complete control over their information. However, this also means that data availability depends on whether the user’s device is online or if another node in the network has a copy of the data. Over time, some Scuttlebutt clients may need to implement garbage collection policies to delete old or less relevant data in order to manage storage space.

An alternative to this peer-to-peer approach is the advent of data storage servers. In the case of Matrix, multiple home servers store copies of room history and synchronize them with each other. When a user sends a message (or any event) in a room, their home servers broadcast the event to other home servers, which then store the event and forward it to their connected clients. Similarly, ActivityPub lets each instance (or server) in the network store its data, typically in a database. The choice of database (relational, NoSQL, etc.) depends on the implementation of the ActivityPub software. For example, Mastodon, a popular ActivityPub platform, uses a PostgreSQL database.

Protocols such as Cyberconnect, Farcaster, and Lens have adopted blockchain for storage. On-chain storage ensures the immutability and verifiability of data, providing a solid foundation for decentralized applications that synchronize state using the underlying consensus mechanism. However, this approach can present scalability challenges, as each piece of data needs to be stored on-chain, potentially leading to high transaction fees and slower retrieval times.

This has led many Web3 social protocols to try a hybrid approach, using on-chain storage to perform low-frequency operations (e.g., profiles, subscriptions), off-chain storage to perform high-frequency events (e.g., likes, retweets, comments), or off-chain storage as a temporary stopgap to bulk upload data on-chain at intervals.

In order to efficiently handle frequent updates between user connections, CyberConnect employs hashed linked lists in a decentralized data store. When you start a connection, an “Operation Log” is created. Subsequent state changes, such as switching between following and unfollowing, are added to this log as a new node. While these updates are initially stored on centralized servers, they are regularly uploaded in bulk to a decentralized storage platform, such as Arweave or FIL. In order to achieve fast data retrieval, the nodes in the operation log are stored centrally. However, users can independently verify data integrity by browsing this list of hash links. Even though some data queries rely on centralized servers, CyberConnect’s system is designed to be fully decentralized while also delivering high performance.

Farcaster uses a similar hybrid approach: on-chain contracts are used for low-frequency operations that are important for consistency and decentralization. Accounts, usernames, storage, and keys are managed using a series of ETH contracts. Off-chain systems are used for high-frequency operations that rely on performance. Messages created by user accounts are stored and propagated on the Farcaster hub’s peer-to-peer network.

Discussion

Decentralized social protocols have the potential to revolutionize the user experience in digital interactions. Fueled by Web3, the accelerated adoption of public-private key pairs will contribute to a broader understanding of identity primitives in this context, and continued auditing and data capture by Web2 social media companies will drive more users elsewhere. We expect the adoption curve of these decentralized social protocols to accelerate.

To facilitate the development of innovative applications, protocol developers and open source contributors urgently need to go beyond the basic data types and relational objects currently used by the infrastructure layer. While existing primitives fully encapsulate the capabilities of traditional Web2 social media, there is still tremendous potential for expansion and innovation. Most of the protocols discussed here are inherently supportive of scalability within the system, providing a solid foundation for future development and open source contributions.

However, interoperability is also critical. While front-end developers can enhance functionality independently, if the enhanced functionality is not interoperable with other applications built on the same underlying protocol, then doing so can be detrimental to the overall benefit of the system. Ensuring compatibility and seamless integration between various applications is critical to the long-term success and adoption of decentralized social protocols.

In the world of data storage, Web3 social protocols tend to favor a hybrid approach. The balanced approach of allocating high-value assets such as identities and content to on-chain primitives while assigning low-risk content such as likes to off-chain solutions not only preserves the integrity and security of critical data, but also provides a user experience close to that of traditional social media platforms.

Decentralized networks promise to transform human communication, information sharing, and community building. By prioritizing user autonomy, privacy, and nurturing organic relationships, these networks are paving the way for a more equitable and user-centric digital environment. In addition, the decentralized nature of these networks helps democratize access to information and resources, mitigating the risks associated with centralized control.