Despite the recent hype around riend.tech, some decentralized social networks are still having a hard time getting users to sign up and stay on their social media platforms.
Two executives in the decentralized social (DeSo) media space told Cointelegraph that as many as 99% of first-time users who enter DeSo end up exiting, either due to a clumsy onboarding or simply don’t know anyone.
Ed Moss, director of growth at Layer-1 blockchain company DeSo, said that the process of transferring cryptocurrencies from an exchange to a wallet with a Chrome extension installed, and then paying a high gas fee to trade on-chain or across-chain is: for the first time It is tedious and expensive for users to use.
“We found that 99% of mainstream users give up at the first step, so it was critical to simplify the process.”
So one of the most important factors is making sure the onboarding process is as frictionless as possible, Moss said.
Imagine you have to mint everything we post on social media and you have to pay for gas. How will you spend your time, money and energy? This is what you should focus on.
— Ruben Cress #HIVE (@RubenCress) October 21, 2022
But according to Suhail Kakar, creator of the DeSo app Onboard, the problems may have started even before that.
Kakar explained that because users need to be familiar with blockchain, smart contracts and wallets before signing up, they are often shy away from taking the first step.
“A party where you don’t know anyone.”
Catching up with the massive network effects of web2 social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter) is no easy feat either.
DeSo apps will take more time to build community, Kakal said, because being present in these apps is “kind of like going to a party where you don’t know anyone.”
He believes that as more and more top creators and influencers move on-chain, this could be an inflection point, as users will eventually follow where high-quality content goes.
April data programme Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have approximately 2.98 billion, 2.0 billion, and 372.9 million monthly active users, respectively. In comparison, Odysee, the most visited decentralized social media network, averaged just 5.3 million monthly unique users between January and April. according to to CoinGecko.
According to Moss, another reason decentralized social media has not yet taken off is that ethereum and other smart contract platforms were not purpose-built to provide large-scale social media applications.
Therefore, we believe that the future of cryptocurrencies will not consist of a single general-purpose blockchain, but rather a series of dominant specialized blockchains, each tailored for a specific class of applications. This is how cryptocurrencies gain mass adoption.
— DeSo (@desoprotocol) December 29, 2021
The ideal solution would be to build a “mass storage” or “infinite state” blockchain capable of storing and indexing large amounts of data at the lowest possible cost, he explained:
“This is what social applications need to store actions like ‘posts’, ‘likes’, ‘follows’, ‘comments’ and ‘social graphs’ directly on-chain, enabling Complete decentralization of the government.”
Without it, Moss argues, end users may never truly own their content, identity and social graph.
What are the trends in Friend.tech?
Meanwhile, Base-based social platform Friend.tech has also seen strong usage over the past week.
The platform allows creators to connect with audiences through tokenized following, where a creator’s influence is represented in shares or keys that can be traded for access to exclusive private chat rooms.
Friend.tech has attracted more than 85,000 users across more than 127,000 wallets, which collectively sent more than 630,000 requests to the network since launching earlier this month, according to to CoinGecko.
related: Decentralized social media is a game changer for creator monetization — Web3 exec
However, other industry experts believe the model could become a fad that lasts six to eight weeks.
Sales revenue of decentralized social media networks is expected to reach $12.1 billion by 2023 and is expected to exceed $101 billion by 2033, at a CAGR of 23.6%, according to Future market insights.
Other decentralized social media networks include Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky (a decentralized Twitter alternative), Mastodon, and Lens Protocol.
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