A bit of background on NEAR social

NEAR social didn’t start natively on NEAR. Its first iteration lived on Mastodon, an open-source software for running self-hosted social media sites. People could use their near wallets to connect and interact with each other. However, Evgeny and the team driving NEAR social quickly realized that this wasn’t a long-term solution as it still had a single point of failure and was not censorship-resistant.

From creating a database to host social interactions (SocialDB), the project eventually evolved into an open space for people in the NEAR ecosystem to explore an open-source, decentralized alternative to Twitter.

Getting into NEAR social On NEAR social users own their data, and developers can easily tap into the power of accessible public data to create their own apps. This enhances network effects as better data leads to better algorithms and, eventually, a better experience for everyone involved.

Widgets

When you go to the NEAR social site, pretty much everything you see is a widget. Widgets are open-source software components that can be combined, forked, and created by anyone with some coding knowledge. Widgets are prettty similar lego blocks, waiting to be turned into whatever you want them to be. An added benefit is that they can be updated and improved without recompiling all dependent widgets — making the process faster and saving computation.NEAR social already has all the widgets necessary to offer an experience similar to Twitter, where you can create and customize your own profile, follow others, chat and create polls. They can be small things like a simple button or the entire home screen of the NEAR social app. Other available widgets / applications include an event planner, polls, Astro DAO’s bounties, a tool to keep track of new years’ resolutions, the pagoda console, a meme generator, and a tool to mint your own social avatars and use them as your pfp.

Funnily enough, at the moment a popular thing to do on NEAR social is poking. Each poke requires a transaction, so the more poking, the higher the transaction volume on NEAR.

Near Social: Building the Social Graph of the Open Web

NEAR Social is a space that brings together the brightest minds in the NEAR ecosystem. It enables anyone to try their idea on a small scale and provides dApps ways to explore how they can integrate with DeSo.

For instance, DEXs like REF are building their own widgets to enable direct swapping for users. And near.social is not limited to NEAR dApps either — anyone can connect widgets to external ecosystems. This means that NEAR social can easily turn into the go-to entry and access point for web3 as a whole.

With the recent launch of the mintbase affiliate links, NEAR social could even turn into a more web3 native place to discover new NFTs while giving those who shared the NFT an incentive to curate.

As more and more devs get on NEAR social, the platform will improve and users will be able to find more ways to customize their interface. The barrier for someone with zero coding knowledge to do more than a few simple changes is still high — but it won’t remain this way. The more people build widgets and interfaces, the easier it’ll be to choose templates you like. There might even be drag-and-drop editors and no-code tools to empower everyone to build their own social experience.

Since its beginnings as a social database, NEAR social has come a long way. It’s definitely exciting to witness the progress it’s made in just a few months, adding social features and new widgets. So if you’re a dev, give it a shot and create a simple widget. And for those of us with less JS knowledge, set up your account and start poking back.

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Overview:

• About a year ago, the first interactions with the Near Social contract began, and in this 12-month period, the use of Near Social has slowly and over time had an upward trend, and its users have generally had a good level of interaction with this project. .

• Each user had an average of 15 transactions and 20 actions in Near Social interaction.

• Daily new users who had their first interaction with Near Social do not show a significant upward or downward trend.

• It is worth mentioning that on March 24, more than 1.5k new users were added to this project. That is, more than 9% of all unique users of this project had their first interaction with this project on March 24th.

• With the assumption made for the number of monthly active users, it can be seen that MAUs had an upward and significant trend.

• With the assumption made for the number of daily active users, it can be seen that there are 148 DAUs in Near Social, who have interacted with this project in an average of about 40% of their total age days in Near Social.