This essay has been in the works for many months now and I am excited to finally have found the time to get it to the point of publishing an early first draft.
When I first started developing this perspective, many elements of web3 which now exist, did not. I, unfortunately, do not have time to fully update and refine it now to include them. So please bear with me for the time being.
Four primary L1 protocols with varying levels of social-layer engagement are testing different visions for what the future of decentralized social media may look like. They are, in alphabetical order: DESO, Farcaster, and LENS. Two other similar types of projects, BlueSky and Mastadon, are also grouped into this bucket of ‘decentralized social media’ though they are not building on a blockchain.
While it is the consumer app-layer (i.e., Instagram, Twitter, etc.) that most people are familiar with simply due to proximity and ease of use, my focus in this essay is on the underlying technology empowering web3 social consumer apps to emerge.
Today it remains unclear which method will prove to be the most effective at scaling to 1B+ users. What is clear to me is that we should expect, and are already beginning to see, a period during which incumbent web2 platforms begin adopting web3 primitives in order to build experiences of comparable aim with the new web3-native social media experiences.
Model 1: A ground-up social media-oriented protocol
The first model assumes that in order to optimize for text-heavy social media (compared to transaction data and EVM), a new cryptographic method is necessary. Today there is only one such protocol, Decentralized Social ($DESO) that is building from this foundational assumption. It assumes that an infinite state protocol that can scale effectively while still being indexed and queried quickly, will provide the optimal foundation for a decentralized social media experience in web3.
There are several potential advantages and challenges associated with this approach. Let me attempt to articulate them – and for the devs reading this, please excuse my simpleton articulation of some very complex and nuanced cryptographic concepts.
Potential Benefits:  One of the biggest advantages is the ability to store, at scale, all data on-chain which offers the promise of permanence. Compare this to off-chain or partially off-chain solutions which are more subject to centralized entity capture or failure which would result in the deletion of associated data. In theory it should be less work for developers to build on top of a decentralized social native protocol since computationally there is less to keep track of. Developers don’t need to keep track of all the transactions, just the hash. Historically on-chain transactions have been optimal for documenting transfers, whereas off-chain transactions have been non-crypto related.  In addition, by storing the information on-chain, it is open and accessible to everyone, potentially reducing querying speed and latency associated with other methods.
Potential Challenges: Â Launching a de-novo blockchain is a material undertaking requiring not only significant financial and time resources but ample know-how which is in very low supply. While engineers are incredibly smart humans, especially blockchain engineers, not everyone has the intellectual horsepower necessary to bring to life a novel cryptographic method for storing data on-chain. Since blockchains often operate as a public-ledger, an on-chain solution could be problematic for some solutions which do not want sensitive data being made permanent and/or accessible by all. For that reason, many developers opt for off-chain data storage to allow for greater privacy when desired.
Tokenization / Financialization
TBU
Model 2: Building on pre-existing web3 protocols
A second model, and the approach most of today’s decentralized social projects are taking, is to build on an L2 scaling solution or ‘side chain’ to an existing L1 protocol such as Ethereum (Farcaster) or Solana (Polygon). For projects that go this route, it’s not as simple as a yes/no answer as to whether to build fully on-chain. There are nuances to the decision. For example, optimizing for storage vs computation capabilities.
In these models it is generally assumed that unstructured data, images, and personally generated social data will reside off-chain due to transaction processing times and costs, and/or privacy concerns.
As with Model 1 (fully on-chain), there are benefits and drawbacks to this approach.
Benefits: get to market faster and benefit from pre-existing ecosystem network effects, as well as pre-existing stable of developers eager to work in these ecosystems. Its more private, as transactions are typically stored off-chain and are not necessarily visible on a public ledger.
Potential Challenges: developers are constrained by on-chain limitations such as compute capacity of the L1. Different dApps will require many bridges to access and transfer information between on-chain and off-chain storage. The additional protocol layers lead to greater security vulnerabilities. Risk of greater centralization and therefore capture and / or censorship by a group. The cost of off-chain data storage and the calls to AWS required to query it.
Tokenization / Financialization
TBU
Summary
First-movers are already experimenting with multiple different methods for building a decentralized social experience of the internet. In the not-too-distant future, founders will have two new important decisions to make: (1) whether to build fully or partially on-chain (web3 tech stack) or off-chain (web2 tech stack), and (2) which aspects of the business are best suited to the respective technology primitive.
It will take the entire ecosystem maturing and user adoption increasing to the point of effectively breaking the system before we see which technical model will win out. In the end, the protocol-level decisions made are unlikely to be the sole determining factor for which model ‘wins’ out. In fact, it is likely that we will see a convergence of methods and primitives.