Decentralization Social "Collapse" Record: From High Hopes to Leaving in Disappointment

Deng Tong, Golden Finance

On November 16, 2025, the decentralized social media application Hey (formerly Lenster) will cease development due to limited funding. The official statement indicated that the annual profit of Hey Pro and Hey Names totals approximately $41,000, which is insufficient to support the team in operating the platform at a scale expected by users.

The decentralized social media sector was once very popular, with many star projects making a huge impact, yet they could not escape a dismal fate.

This article reviews the fallen decentralized social media projects.

1. Hey

Hey originally named Lenster, Yogi Nth was created in March 2022. Yogi Nth is also a front-end engineer who has worked on Aave and Lens Protocol related projects.

Hey was initially positioned as a social client similar to X. It was later renamed Hey.xyz, becoming a decentralized social application focused on the Lens protocol ecosystem. It emphasizes decentralization and permissionless access, with the core advantage of allowing users to have ownership of their digital identity, content, and social graph. Users can publish content rich in media, comment, repost, and experience mainstream social features like real-time notifications on the platform. Its uniqueness lies in supporting cross-platform interoperability, allowing users to use the fans and content they have accumulated on Hey in other applications compatible with the Lens protocol without needing to rebuild their social network.

Hey posted on X that the reason for the Hey project stopping is that the annual income is only $41,000.

Leaving the Hey project is a difficult decision, but the reality is simple: this platform cannot be self-sustaining.

Hey Pro and Hey Names have always been optional. Among 850,000 users, only about 2,000 chose the Pro version, bringing in $20 per person, totaling about $40,000 a year. Hey Names contributed an additional income of about $1,000. So in total, about $41,000 a year, which is not enough to support the platform to operate at the scale users expect, unless we pay out of our own pockets. Over 99% of users use Hey completely free.

Hey, we have never committed to tokens or airdrops. It was never born for mining. It is a social client based on Lens, not a protocol, a treasury, nor a place where we control funds. We have been continuously releasing for four years, adding new features all the time, and always maintaining full transparency. Even in the event of an accident, we will publicly handle refunds and explanations.

The code is always open source. There are no contract restrictions, no hidden incentive mechanisms, this is just a community tool, but it has reached the funding limit. Thanks to everyone who has supported us along the way, the community can continue to shape the future direction.

I hope the above explanation can answer all questions.

Hey, as a front-end application of the Lens protocol ecosystem, its user scale relies on the user base of the entire Lens ecosystem. However, the Lens protocol itself has encountered a stagnation in user growth due to a decline in popularity, which has directly led to Hey's revenue predicament.

2. Friend.tech

Friend.tech was jointly founded by two anonymous developers, 0xracerAlt and Shrimppepe. It was once a wildly popular decentralized social platform in Web3, quickly gaining traction thanks to its innovative model of tokenizing social influence. However, just a year and a month after its launch, it faced the unfortunate fate of shutdown.

In August 2023, Friend.tech was officially launched on the Base blockchain, gaining significant attention on its first day. In November, the Twitter account of founder 0xracerAlt suddenly became inaccessible, raising doubts about the project. In May 2024, the V2 version was released along with the issuance of the platform's native token FRIEND, attempting to revive the declining momentum through version iteration and token issuance.

FRIEND once had a glorious moment of debuting at its peak, in May 2024, the coin price approached the historical high of 3 dollars, but has since continued to decline, reporting at 0.02443 dollars at the time of writing.

In September 2024, Friend.tech announced that the project management and ownership parameters have been set to the Ethereum zero address, which means relinquishing control over the smart contract, and the platform is essentially shut down.

Friend.tech has had highlights far beyond other decentralized social platforms: on its first day, daily active users reached 136,000, over a month after launch, protocol fees exceeded 5,000 ETH, cumulative transaction count surpassed 4.59 million, and the peak locked value reached as much as 51.68 million dollars.

But the decline in popularity is very rapid, with the lowest daily active users in July 2024 being only 15.

As mentioned earlier, more than a month after its launch, the protocol fees exceeded 5000 ETH, which caused the project team to lose motivation too early, and even the founder's account went missing at one point, leading to a loss of user confidence. Additionally, there is a lot of speculation in Friend.tech: users purchase Keys of KOLs to enter private chat rooms for exclusive content, and the price increases with the number of buyers. This attracted many speculators rather than genuine social users, who bought KOL's Keys and then resold them at high prices for profit, resulting in a high entry barrier for new users later on. When speculation goes unbacked, it is inevitable that the platform will cool down.

3. Steemit

Steemit was co-founded by Daniel Larimer (BM, also the founder of EOS) and Ned Scott. In January 2016, Steemit completed its core creation work, with a preliminary launch in March and an official release in July, quickly attracting the attention of creators with its model of “content creation rewarded with tokens.” By January 2017, the number of registered users surpassed 125,000, with daily active users reaching 4,400; by June of the same year, registered users further exceeded 200,000. After that, the popularity continued to decline, gradually fading from public view.

In March 2017, technical core member Daniel Larimer left Steemit, causing its technical development to slow down (after leaving Steemit, BM devoted himself to the EOS project). The reason Steemit was able to attract a large number of users was its token reward mechanism, which peaked at over $8 in January 2018 but has since continued to decline, now only at $0.07791 at the time of writing, making it difficult to attract users' attention again. Additionally, faced with competition from rising stars like Farcaster and Friend.tech, Steemit is once again at a loss.

4. Voice

In June 2019, Dan Larimer launched the decentralized social platform Voice, positioning it as an application that could change the industry landscape, directly competing with mainstream social platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

In 2020, Block.one made an additional investment in Voice, bringing the total investment amount to 300 million dollars. In 2021, due to poor operations, Block.one announced that Voice would be upgraded and transformed into an NFT social platform for creators, where users can create and trade various formats of digital assets.

However, the transformation ultimately could not save Voice. In September 2023, Voice officially announced that it would gradually cease operations within a few months, while disabling new user registrations and the trading market, and plans to launch NFT asset migration services. The retention of assets for old users will end in December 2024. This means that Voice will completely disappear from the decentralized social media space.

Although Voice was created by the blockchain celebrity BM at the time, it still could not escape the fate of extinction. First of all, the functional design and user experience of Voice as a decentralized social platform often do not compare favorably to traditional social platforms; secondly, after transitioning to the NFT space, it lacks competitiveness compared to mature competitors like OpenSea. Moreover, the NFT market has significantly declined after 2022, and Voice has struggled to improve due to the adverse economic environment. Additionally, with initial investments reaching up to 300 million dollars but ultimately generating very little revenue, it has become difficult to continue.

5. Phaver

The founder and CEO of the Phaver platform is Joonatan Lintala. In 2020, Phaver was officially established, with its initial positioning aimed at breaking the social barriers between Web2 and Web3 through a Web2.5 model. In 2023, it emerged during the SocialFi boom, completing a $7 million seed round financing in October of the same year. In September 2024, the platform entered the market through TGE, launching its native token SOCIAL.

In April 2025, according to DeFi researcher Ignas, the social media application Phaver has ceased operations, and its token price has dropped 99% since the TGE in September 2024. Members of the Phaver team stated that first, there were technical issues with the TGE and airdrop, causing users to be unable to claim in time, leading to FUD; second, Phaver paid over $1 million in fees to go live on 5 CEXs; third, due to poor market sentiment, the team did not sell tokens at the TGE, resulting in insufficient operating funds. As a Finnish company, Phaver also needs to pay employees 1 to 2 months of severance.

6. DeSo

DeSo, originally named BitClout, was created by Nader Al-Naji. In May 2019, Nader Al-Naji built the dedicated underlying blockchain for DeSo. In March 2021, the private beta testing officially ended and it was launched under the name BitClout.

In May 2024, DeSo will conduct a Revolution Proof of Stake consensus upgrade on the testnet. After the consensus upgrade, it will support 500 posts per second (10% of X scale), maximized burn fee (BMF) algorithm, 1-second confirmation time, 20% annual yield on staked DESO, and permissionless validators, among other features.

The core model of DeSo is to tokenize creators, allowing users to purchase tokens of celebrities or creators to participate in social interactions. This model leans more towards financial speculation rather than genuine social needs. Moreover, the platform faced serious privacy issues at its launch, as it captured and duplicated a large number of Twitter celebrities' personal profiles without authorization and created corresponding platform tokens for these celebrities, which garnered a lot of negative feedback.

Conclusion

The decentralized social track once developed rapidly, with star projects like Friend.tech capturing attention, but it also came with quick iterations and eliminations of projects. Each project once shone brightly and received much praise during its rise, but ultimately faded away after the trend passed.

For these decentralized social projects, issues such as immature technology, poor user experience, credibility crises, and intense market competition can all become the last straw that breaks the camel's back. Temporary hype cannot provide a long-term survival opportunity for the projects; how to maintain current survival while also considering the construction of long-term value for the future is the balance that decentralized social projects should focus on.