The Rise of Web3 Social Web: Addressing Cold Start and User Retention Challenges

In 2017, researchers asserted that decentralized social networks "will never succeed." They believed that such networks faced three insurmountable challenges: attracting and retaining users, handling users' personal information, and addressing advertising issues. At the time, it seemed that the scale advantages of tech giants in these areas were difficult to challenge.

However, over time, things that were once considered "impossible" now seem to be feasible. We may be on the eve of a transformation in the concept of the Social Web. This article will explore how new ideas in the decentralized social ( DeSo ) space address these "old problems", mainly including:

1. Use the open Social Web graph to solve the cold start problem.
2. Use personal identification and encryption technology to solve identity issues
3. Solve income issues through token economic models and incentive mechanisms.

Social Web Graph and Cold Start Problem

Social media platforms generally face the cold start problem: how to attract users in the absence of a user base and network effects. The traditional approach is to overcome this challenge through large-scale marketing promotion. Emerging platforms often launch registration blitzes at the right time, quickly accumulating users through novel user experiences, media coverage, or creating a sense of scarcity.

However, this approach is often difficult to sustain. Retaining users and continuously generating content and profits is a common challenge faced by many platforms. As platforms decline, the valuable user social graphs they have accumulated will also disappear. Future Social Webs may need to repeat difficult marketing strategies to restart the network.

The root of this problem lies in the tight binding of the social graph and the application itself in Web2 Social Web. The two are interdependent: the novelty of the application drives the development of the social graph, which in turn becomes a moat for the application. Users are largely unwilling to leave mainstream platforms because "all their friends are there".

So, what if we separate the social graph from specific applications? Even if a certain application disappears, we can still leverage the social relationships built on it to easily launch new applications. This is exactly the idea behind how Web3 addresses the cold start problem.

Public Chain as an Open Social Web

To some extent, public blockchains like Ethereum themselves are a social graph. By viewing a particular address or ENS domain, we can understand a person's on-chain social profile: what assets they hold, who they transact with, which communities they belong to, etc.

This on-chain social profile can naturally serve as a starting point for a new decentralized Social Web. Some companies are exploring this path.

For example, some platforms convert hexadecimal data on the Ethereum blockchain explorer into readable portfolios or "profiles" and provide the function to send messages to these addresses, leveraging on-chain data to launch a messaging-based Social Web. There are also projects attempting to build a Twitter-like social network using on-chain user profiles. By utilizing advanced large language models, raw transaction data can be made more readable and understandable, thereby creating a hybrid of data resources, news feeds, and social networks.

Build Native Social Web Protocol

Relying solely on public chain data has a problem: this data is not rich enough for social applications. Public chains are primarily designed for financial applications, and the data they natively collect, such as transaction history and account balances, is not the most suitable for the Social Web.

Therefore, one approach is to build a dedicated social graph protocol on top of the public blockchain. For example, there are protocols that abstract social interactions into different on-chain behaviors, such as "posting", "commenting", and "sharing", among others. There are also protocols that focus more on link aggregation (, including on-chain and off-chain sources ), and concentrate on activities and fan communities as initial use cases.

The key to these social graph protocols is that they do not directly build top-level applications, but rather provide the open social graph layer needed to build and expand these applications. Their core advantage is that even if a successful application disappears, the generated social graph can still be used by other developers. Therefore, a single successful marketing campaign or application is sufficient to launch the entire ecosystem.

From Scratch Design Decentralized Social Web

The third strategy is to build decentralized solutions from scratch. The premise is that social media applications are the cornerstone of digital experiences, thus requiring dedicated blockchain ( or other decentralized ) solutions to natively integrate the basic operations of social media, rather than building protocols on top of financial-oriented infrastructures. In short, this is a "application chain" for social media.

There are projects building an L1 blockchain focused on social applications. Unlike mainstream public chains that focus on "transactions per second", it is dedicated to optimizing "posts per second", as well as the communication and storage needs of social applications. Various social applications are planned to be built on this L1 blockchain, including long-form content, short articles, and forums.

Other decentralized social media platforms generally follow this ground-up design strategy. Although they are not blockchain-based solutions, they rely on distributed server systems to ensure decentralization. For example, some platforms use email-like systems, allowing users to choose between different service providers. Others develop applications based on open-source protocols, essentially creating open social graphs with APIs that include "follow", "like", and "post" functionalities.

The common point of these projects is that they do not recognize the existing public chain design as suitable for the Social Web. Although this approach allows the projects to have finer control over design decisions and user experience, it also cuts off potential connections with other mature elements of the Web3 ecosystem, such as DeFi and NFT communities. Furthermore, the degree of decentralization of these solutions remains to be observed, especially in the absence of public chain guarantees. Whether they will ultimately bundle social graphs with applications like existing Social Webs or fully decentralize the social graph layer and attract diverse applications and development teams is a key question for the future of Web3 social.