Why Silos Will Kill Web3 Social Before It Starts

Social graphs are trapped assets. A user's followers on Lens Protocol cannot natively interact with their Farcaster frame, creating a fragmented identity that destroys the core value proposition of a portable, user-owned social layer.

Protocols compete, users lose. The current landscape mirrors early DeFi's liquidity fragmentation, where Lens, Farcaster, and DeSo build walled gardens instead of interoperable primitives, forcing developers to choose a single stack and stifling innovation.

Silos kill network effects. A social network's value scales with its user base, but isolated protocols create sub-critical communities. The solution is not another protocol, but interoperability standards and intent-based routing that treat social data like a liquid asset.

Social graphs are proprietary assets. Every major protocol—Farcaster, Lens Protocol, DeSo—hoards its own graph. This creates walled gardens identical to Web2, where your network and content are trapped.

Interoperability is a marketing lie. The promise of a portable social identity fails without a shared data layer. Competing standards like Farcaster Frames and Lens Open Actions are incompatible, forcing developers to choose a side.

The network effect is inverted. A protocol's value accrues to its closed ecosystem, not its users. This replicates the extractive model of Twitter and Facebook, where the platform's growth is prioritized over user sovereignty.

Evidence: Farcaster's 400,000 users cannot natively interact with Lens Protocol's 125,000 profiles. This fragmentation kills the composable utility required for applications to reach critical mass.

Social graphs are non-portable assets. A user's followers, reputation, and content are locked inside each platform, creating switching costs that kill competition. This replicates the pre-DeFi era where liquidity was siloed across Uniswap, SushiSwap, and Curve.

Token bridges solve the wrong problem. Moving an ERC-20 between chains is trivial with Stargate or LayerZero. The real challenge is porting social context—proving a Lens Protocol post's engagement on a Farcaster client.

Interoperability requires a shared namespace. The solution is a decentralized identity primitive, like Ethereum's ENS, that anchors social data. Without this, cross-platform features like composable reputation are impossible.

Evidence: DeFi's composability boom required ERC-20 and AMM standards. Social needs its own ERC-6551 for token-bound accounts, enabling portable profiles across all applications.

Silos enable superior UX is the primary defense. Builders argue that controlling the full stack, like Farcaster's Frames or Lens's modules, allows for seamless, fast experiences. This is a pre-composability mindset that prioritizes short-term polish over long-term liquidity.

Data ownership is sufficient is the second fallacy. Protocols like Lens give users a portable NFT profile, but the social graph itself remains a walled API. True ownership means the graph is a composable primitive, not just a portable credential. This is the difference between owning a house and owning the deed to a house on a private island.

Evidence: The DeFi summer model proves this. Composability defeated silos. Isolated lending protocols died. Aave and Compound thrived because their liquidity became a public utility for the entire ecosystem. Social graphs that refuse this fate, like early isolated DEXs, will be forked or bridged into irrelevance by protocols like Farcaster Frames or cross-chain intent systems.