In 2026, I plan to be fully back to decentralized social.
If we want a better society, we need better mass communication tools. We need mass communication tools that surface the best information and arguments and help people find points of agreement. We need mass communication tools that serve the user's long-term interest, not maximize short-term engagement. There is no simple trick that solves these problems. But there is one important place to start: more competition. Decentralization is the way to enable that: a shared data layer, with anyone being able to build their own client on top.
In fact, since the start of the year I've been back to decentralized social already. Every post I've made this year, or read this year, I made or read with https://t.co/BJ3J4TvNNu, a multi-client that covers reading and posting to X, Lens, Farcaster and Bluesky (though bluesky has a 300 char limit, so they don't get to see my beautiful long rants).
But crypto social projects has often gone the wrong way. Too often, we in crypto think that if you insert a speculative coin into something, that counts as "innovating", and moves the world forward. Mixing money and social is not inherently wrong: Substack shows that it's possible to create an economy that supports very high-quality content. But Substack is about _subscribing to creators_, not _creating price bubbles around them_. Over the past decade, we have seen many many attempts at incentivizing creators by creating price bubbles around them, and all fail by (i) rewarding not content quality, but pre-existing social capital, and (ii) the tokens all going to zero after one or two years anyway.
Too many people make galaxy-brained arguments that creating new markets and new assets is automatically good because it "elicits information", when the rest of their product development actions clearly betray that they're not actually interested in maximizing people's ability to benefit from that information. That is not Hayekian info-utopia, that is corposlop.
Hence, decentralized social should be run by people who deeply believe in the "social" part, and are motivated first and foremost by solving the problems of social.
The Aave team has done a great job stewarding Lens up to this point. I'm excited about what will happen to Lens over the next year, because I think the new team coming in are people who actually are interested in the "social": even back when the decentralized social space barely existed, they were trying to figure out how to do encrypted tweets.
I plan to post more there this year.
I encourage everyone to spend more time in Lens, Farcaster and the broader decentralized social world this year. We need to move beyond everyone constantly tweeting inside a single global info warzone, and into a reopened frontier, where new and better forms of interaction become possible.
I’ve been working on decentralized social for almost 10years now. Definitely understand Farcaster team’s decision but I do have some thoughts to share.
Farcaster focus on wallet is like Starbucks not focus on coffee.
Asian folks don’t drink coffee that much originally — but if Starbucks gives up coffee in Asia it is just another western fast food chain .
Take the example of Japan and Korea, it need 1-2 generations after WWII and WTO dominance economy world to make it a common thing for the society. For Chinese we witnessed that in our generation. Now these countries combined have more coffee consumption than US easily.
If one thing is ideologically cool and ideally better + functioning, (like decentralized social ) it just needs time. And need a young generation to grow up.
I’m here for another 10 years. :)
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