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Is Friend.tech's heyday over? Decentralized social network DeSo points out key issues with Web3 social applications

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Is Friend.tech

Given the trend of decentralized social application Friend.tech, Cointelegraph interviewed the decentralized social network DeSo to explore the current issues and challenges of decentralized social networks, and to try to address the unavoidable user attrition. In addition, based on the gradually waning on-chain data activity, is Friend.tech seemingly heading towards decline?

The Current Problems of Decentralized Social Applications

Executives from the Layer-1 blockchain company DeSo commented on the popularity of Friend.tech and shared their own experiences with Cointelegraph:

Up to 99% of users abandon the decentralized social applications before even entering, and those who do enter eventually churn.

They also pointed out the following reasons:

High Entry Barrier

Ed Moss, Growth Lead at DeSo, emphasized that the complex and difficult-to-understand Web3 user experience leads to frustration for those unfamiliar with blockchain technology, which is a major reason why most decentralized social applications fail.

Terms like blockchain, smart contracts, wallets, high gas fees, and cross-chain are off-putting and fail to attract non-industry insiders.

Difficulty in Community Building

Popular mainstream Web2 social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have monthly active users of 2.99 billion, 2 billion, and 560 million, respectively.

However, data from Coingecko shows that even the most active decentralized social media platform, Odysee, has only one-tenth of Twitter's user base.

Suhail Kakar, a creator of DeSo's on-chain applications, explained, "Nobody wants to spend time and money to experience a community software with people they don't know."

He added that decentralized social applications still need a significant amount of time to build their own communities and user bases.

Differences in Blockchain Characteristics

Ed Moss believes that even the most widely used blockchain like Ethereum or those claiming to process thousands of transactions per second are not well-suited for building social applications.

Social media requires extensive data storage and indexing to achieve low-cost, high-capacity features, rather than emphasizing processing thousands of posts per second, which no current blockchain can handle.

Furthermore, he pointed out that uploading all information such as posting, liking, following, and commenting to the chain would best align with the characteristics of a so-called decentralized social network.

Is Friend.tech Dead?

Upon closer examination of Friend.tech's current situation, it appears that after only two weeks since its launch, it has been deemed dead due to a rapid decline in trading volume, inflow of funds, and transaction fees.

Firstly, data from Dune shows that on August 21, Friend.tech had as many as 518,000 transactions, which dropped by 89% to only 55,000 transactions yesterday.

Additionally, there has been a significant decrease in both funds inflow and number of buyers and sellers, with the former dropping from a peak of over $15.6 million in daily inflow to just $2 million yesterday.

The number of buyers and sellers decreased from a high of 85,000 people to 18,000 people (including duplicates), a 79% decrease.

Of course, it is premature to declare the death of an application that is not even three weeks old, but the speculative rush of people driven by greed will eventually dissipate after the first official airdrop.