Intro to Lens Protocol
The State of Social Media
We live in a time where millions of users access centralized social media applications daily. Popular sites like Twitter and Meta help us stay connected to friends, family, news updates, and more.
In this section, we'll look at the Lens Protocol and how it can be used to build decentralized social media applications on the Polygon blockchain! We'll also explore why the Lens Protocol is a great toolkit for developers and how it can provide a more secure user experience than centralized social media.
What is The Lens Protocol?
The Lens Protocol is a decentralized social graph that allows developers to build social media platforms and profiles.
What exactly is a social graph, though? A social graph is a collection of nodes that represent individual users, organizations, and any connections between those nodes. You can think of it as your friend lists on social media sites, your connections on LinkedIn, and who you're following on Twitter just to list a few examples.
Decentralizing Social Media: Why Lens is Important
Web2 social media platforms like Twitter and Meta can be prone to censorship since they are centralized. A post can be removed by administration for any reason. In some countries, the government may censor the internet and some social media platforms as well.
The Lens Protocol solves this problem by not only giving developers a useful toolkit to build social media dApps, but also by giving users control over their own profiles and content.
Since the Lens Protocol is decentralized, users can create profiles and post content without the risk of their content being removed. This means that developers can use Lens to build a social network that is more secure and more connected than traditional social media platforms.
The Lens Toolkit
What can developers do with the Lens Protocol? The protocol itself is built with modularity in mind, meaning that it has different modules (bits of code that help perform various functions) to use in the development process, making development even easier. Also, any modules added in the future will allow new features to be implemented seamlessly.
Let's break down the current modules and their uses:
- Profile: This module is what allows users to create a Lens profile. When a profile is created, a unique ProfileNFT gets minted. This ProfileNFT contains the history of the user's posts, comments, and any other content that the user has created.
- Post: Implementing this module allows users to post and share content. IPFS and other media types are supported.
- Collect: The Collect module will allow users to collect posts from users that they follow. The collect module allows posts to be turned into collectible NFTs.
- Mirror: The Mirror module will allow users to re-share posts, like a retweet on Twitter.
- Follow: The follow module will allow users to follow other users. Every time a user follows another user, a unique NFT is issued to the follower. This can allow for additional governance to be implemented into a dApp, as you can see things like who someone's first follower is.
- Comment: The comment module allows users to comment on posts.
Since the Lens Protocol is open source as well, you can even create your own modules.
What else can Lens do?
So, we learned how useful Lens Protocol is for developers and how it also gives the power back to users who want to create and manage their own content. But, what can else Lens do? Using Lens, users can sign into a growing collection of dApps and services that are built on the Lens Protocol.
A great example of a dApp built on Lens Protocol is Lenster (a Community built, open source social network). Lenster is essentially a decentralized Twitter, allowing users to follow others, post content, and build a community.
The Lens team also created LensFrens, a dApp that recommends users to follow based on your web3 footprint. This can be super useful when trying to find other people to follow.
These two dApps are just examples of what the Lens Protocol can do. We are still in the early stages of decentralized social media, so more dApps will be created over time to connect to. This is another great thing about the Lens Procol - it's completely open source, so new dApps are currently being built.
There are other many great dApps waiting to be built by you! You can check out all the great dApp ideas on the official Lens website.
Next step: Building with Lens
Now that we've learned a bit about how the Lens Protocol works, we'll learn how to build a Lens-compatible dApp in the next page! Tweet by clicking the button on this page and let Stani, the founer, know you're building on Lens!