With the launch of Lens and Farcaster, Web3 Social has gained more awareness and recognition, at least in the web3 space.

No one knows exactly how it will play out, but many of us agree that we need to move away from web2 social for various reasons.

One of these reasons is that big web2 social platforms are unable to efficiently defend against spam bots. Instead, their algorithmic defense systems often mistakenly suspend legitimate new accounts, and relying on customer support to resolve it is a pipe dream.

Not to mention that a centralized platform can take away your profile/username at any time they want - just google what Facebook did to the @meta account on Instagram, or how Elon confiscated @x and @music on Twitter.

On web2, you don’t own your data.

Gradually, then suddenly

The downfall of web2 social will not be instant, but gradual. We are at the very beginning of this process, and it will take a lot of time and experimentation to find the right product/market fits for Web3 Social and adoption.

I see parallels with the early web, where each community had its own self-hosted forum. This was before Facebook did a big consolidation and communities moved to Facebook Groups/Pages.

The first phase in every technological disruption is very fragmented, with lots of experimentation.

Consolidation comes later.

Community-owned chat

At Iggy Social, we believe that many web3 communities will have their own web3 social space that they’ll completely control.

A community-owned chat, where community members can choose their own rules and elect their own moderators.

That’s why we’re building an open-source template, similar to Wordpress but for Web3 Social.

Why a comparison with Wordpress?

Just like you can freely download Wordpress and adapt it to your needs (e.g., for your own blog), you can also take the Iggy Social template, customize it, and set up your Web3 Social web app.

The web app code is freely available on GitHub: https://github.com/iggy-social/iggy-social-frontend

Here are some of the communities that have forked it and set up their own social sites: SGB Chat, BasePunk, FLR Chat.

Integrations and revenue

Apart from being community-owned and customizable, this kind of web3 social app also allows you to integrate other dApps and web3 protocols. You can integrate a token swap, and the community can decide which tokens are supported for swapping.

Additionally, this community space can also generate revenue for the community treasury. For example, the community can choose to add a small swap fee, which goes into the community treasury and can be used to fund common activities or further feature development.

In web2 social, your activity enriches corporations.

In web3, your activity benefits the community you love and belong to.