In a world where data privacy and true ownership are garnering unprecedented attention, the evolution of social platforms is inevitable. From the heart of Silicon Valley to the decentralized landscape of Web3, the journey of tech visionaries is both fascinating and revolutionary. Joonatan Lintala, a prominent figure who transitioned from the echelons of tech behemoths like Google and Facebook to co-founding Phaver, offers a glimpse into this transformative path. Dive into an insightful conversation with Joonatan as he shares the inspiration behind Phaver, the challenges and triumphs of building in the Web3 space, and the pivotal role of NFTs in reshaping our online social life.
Beyond the Walled Gardens: Phaver’s Mission to Decentralize and Democratize Social Media
Ishan Pandey: Joonatan, your career journey has seen you transition from tech giants like Google and Facebook to co-founding Phaver. How have these diverse experiences prepared you for the challenges of building a Web3 social platform?
Joonatan Lintala: From an operational standpoint, both a giant like Google and the startup journey from a few people to a globally leading Facebook ad-tech company taught a lot of helpful things about scaling, product design and leadership. But a much more important lesson comes from seeing how the sausage is made in Web2 social companies and realizing the users really are the product. This makes my mission crystal clear and keeps our team pushing forward, as there can be such a massive impact on the world in turning this around and giving the users control.
Ishan Pandey: You and Tomi both had successful careers in large corporations before transitioning to the startup world. What were some of the factors that led to this decision and how do you believe your previous experiences have influenced Phaver's vision and mission?
Joonatan Lintala: We were both lucky to work in highly successful companies over the previous decade of our careers as well as making an impact on every continent around the world and working in a global environment. This, on the other hand, gave us the confidence and ambition to really start on a moonshot trajectory, but also has been often showing us what we don’t want to become. Instead of a vague “don’t be evil”, the first value we wrote down for Phaver is “net-positive impact”, meaning whatever Phaver ends up doing, we want to make the world actually better, not just avoid messing it up more.
Ishan Pandey: You mentioned that there was a need to "rebuild the social ecosystem from scratch". Can you delve deeper into the challenges you observed with the current social ecosystem and how Phaver plans to address these?
Joonatan Lintala:We initially considered many options aimed as supplemental to Web2 social apps, such as creator monetization and genuine peer recommendations, but soon realized that as long as the few giant apps control all the data, visibility and access, there is very little to be done to improve the situation. Furthermore, the environmental impact of forcing every creator to become an “influencer” and peddle junk to their followers is simply not feasible and we need to find more native ways for content creation to be rewarded.
For Phaver, step one in this plan is to give users a 3rd party way to back up their social graph on-chain, meaning we can never take it away and they can always migrate elsewhere. With this, we move from the “don’t be evil” era to “can’t be evil”, where users are such powerful stakeholders that the only way to succeed is to treat them fairly and reward the value they create. From here, Phaver has been building a gamified reward system that will factor in those who create value on the other side and those who want additional reach or advertising options on the other. Long term, the goal is to have a fair in-app economy that is both sustainable and profitable, with tokens acting as a method of liquidity between the various parties.
Ishan Pandey: Phaver is pioneering the use of NFTs for ownership and control of online social life. How does this fundamentally change the user experience on social platforms, and what are the implications for user privacy and security?
Joonatan Lintala:The goal for Phaver is to actually minimize the impact to the daily user experience, but in the background, NFTs allow providing a modular and interoperable experience for users, which in the future can reduce the burden of having to scan a dozen walled garden apps each day. Instead, in Web3 you can choose your experience from ones aggregated among many networks like Phaver all the way to highly niche and localized ones, while the same content and interactions are available in and between all these apps.
For privacy, NFTs are sort of step in the wrong direction as on-chain data is by default public, but various encryption options already exist and for example the upcoming Phaver DMs are end-to-end encrypted by your crypto wallet, courtesy of XMTP. The bigger impact comes from giving users their seat at the table and ensuring the invasive spyware economy of Web2 is no longer the only option and users can always find an app that keeps their privacy concerns in mind.
Ishan Pandey: Phaver was the first mobile app to launch on the Lens Protocol. How were you able to achieve this milestone and what were the challenges you faced during this process?
Joonatan Lintala: Phaver started talking with the Lens/Aave team already months before the protocol was publicly announced, so we had a good head start and had prepared our Web2 app to be compatible with Lens from day 1 of their mainnet lauch. There are, of course, always challenges in being an early adopter and implementing a new Lens app today more than a year later would be much faster and easier. On the other hand, due to this early position, Phaver is still the most popular mobile app for Lens and has built an industry-leading community.
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Ishan Pandey: How does Phaver ensure fair monetization for creators, which is one of the main reasons the platform was initially created?
Joonatan Lintala: For any creator monetization, there are two big questions, who are eligible for the rewards and where does the money come from. The efforts in Web2 have mostly focused on giving a very small share of total ad revenue and only to the tiny pool of largest creators. For Phaver the goal is to build a sustainable gamified economy that rewards the creators, curators and moderators in fair relation to the value they create, while monetizing this program and the app operations through not only advertiser partnerships but also premium content subscriptions, boosted visibility and many functions commonly found in successful freemium mobile games.
Ishan Pandey: You noted that the most valuable online asset for most people isn't a "precious jpeg," but their online social life. How does Phaver help users protect and leverage this asset?
Joonatan Lintala: With integrations like Lens Protocol and CyberConnect, we ensure that the daily actions and relationships of users are backed up on-chain, potentially even in multiple separate protocols. This, alongside with the public and open source nature of protocols ensures that, while day-to-day the experience is very similar to before, nobody can experience the devastating moment of losing their entire social network or even livelihood on the whim of one of the Silicon Valley billionaires. \
Ishan Pandey: Given your experiences and Phaver's mission, what is your vision for the future of social media in the Web3 space, and how does Phaver fit into this future?
Joonatan Lintala: While some have helpfully asked whether we plan to be the next Facebook or Twitter, I strongly believe that nobody should have that level of power over the social lives of others. Instead, we envision a future where the app landscape can be split into hundreds of purpose-built experiences with their own monetization and content discovery mechanisms.
In this space, we hope Phaver will stand out as one of the most popular ones due to our reward mechanisms ensuring the content on Phaver is better, more curated and efficiently moderated compared to other competitors who have access to all the same data. In the end, the competitive advantage in Web3 no longer comes from who holds owns the social graphs, but rather who uses them in the most user-friendly way, surfacing interesting quality content while keeping the bots and propaganda at bay.
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