SNDB - Social Network Data Bridge

The biggest friction for people to adopt a new social network is the cold start problem - connections and reputations established on incumbent platforms are difficult to migrate. For regular people, it's hard to leave a social network where their friends are on; For creators, it's hard to leave their established followers for which they can monetize.

Vampire attacks are commonly seen from new entrants, typically in the form of the following:

1. Authentication with incumbent identity
2. Request for graph permissions
3. Cross posting on incumbent platforms One of the most successful example is TikTok cross posting on Instagram, and requesting user to connect with FB to find friends.

Our solution is to build a data bridge that helps people reduce the friction of bringing their data from web2 incumbents to web3, and empower web3 new entrants to perform vampire attacks on web2. This involves the following:

1. User authenticates and grants SNDB permission to their own data on web2 incumbents, for which they have rights to. SNDB stores access token.
2. SNDB downloads user data and store on Filecoin encrypted. Data include username, profile pics, friend/follower graphs, published content.
3. User can choose to publish to web3 Social Network. E.g. with a Lens protocol adapter, a user can mint a Lens profile populated with existing info from Twitter easily, and publishing some of the recent tweets.
4. User can share graph info with web3 Social Network, which can be used to find people they already know. E.g. user auto follow Lens profiles that they are already following on Twitter.
5. Content can be cross posted from web3 to web2 via making a request to SNDB which stores the user access token.

In addition to the above, we also added tokenomics so that users can mint SNDB tokens based on the likes they get from content published on web2. SNDB tokens can represent how much influence one has on web2, which in the future we'd like to partner with web3 social networks to extract this value. E.g. converted to ads credit for additional reach and exposure.

This project uses Solidity for smart contracts deployed through FEVM on the Filecoin network. These contracts can be interfaced with using Web3 JSON-RPC calls, and users will typically uses Metamask.

It uses IPFS and CID's for storage of assets and as locators through the SNDB.sol contract deployed on FEVM. The simple informational website is built using ReactJS, and a Python script to upload a user's social network data will be provided. The Python script will use web3py and an IPFS Python client.