Vitalik announces a full return to decentralized social media, discusses the true competitiveness of Web3's future

【BlockBeats】On January 21, there was an interesting development—Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed that he has started to play on the decentralized social track. Since the beginning of this year, all his posts and reading activities have been handled through Firefly.social, a multi-client tool that covers protocols like X, Lens, Farcaster, and Bluesky in one go, demonstrating his commitment through action.

More importantly, he shared a timeline: planning to fully return to the decentralized social ecosystem by 2026. He is also calling on the entire industry to re-examine the essence of “social.” Think about it, the套路 of centralized platforms is to maximize short-term engagement and speculative hype, but is that really what we need?

Vitalik believes that a truly valuable social tool should help people find high-quality information, rational voices, and genuine consensus, rather than pushing people into traffic traps. There are no shortcuts to achieving this goal—competition is essential, and decentralization excels at this. Through shared data layers, anyone can build their own client, and this openness itself is the fertile ground for competition.

He also pointed out an old problem in the crypto social field: “Is forcibly attaching speculative tokens to social products considered innovation?” This idea is outdated. Historically, projects that inflated prices around creators usually rewarded existing social status rather than content quality, and in the end, the tokens often didn’t end well.

In his view, decentralized social should be driven by teams genuinely concerned with “the social issues themselves,” rather than relying on financial narratives for support. Regarding Lens, he praised the governance work of the Aave team and has expectations for the new team taking over, believing they understand the essence of social better and have explored directions like crypto tweets early on.

Finally, he stated that in the coming year, he will speak more frequently on decentralized social platforms and encourages users to experience ecosystems like Lens and Farcaster more. Instead of being trapped in a single global information battlefield, it’s better to explore more open and diverse new interaction methods.