Decentralisation protects your content: A Lens story

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26 Dec 2025

If you've not joined up to Lens yet see our getting started guide https://www.bulbapp.io/p/dcde38b3-7ec2-490c-94fe-16a6a5c947c7/come-join-us-on-lens?s_id=f4e46be7-7ad0-47c7-b3c6-5f7c8d039792

Lens is a decentralised social media network. That really doesn't mean much to people... until it does.

Hey goes dark

We wrote a recent post about getting started on Lens (see the start of the article for that). In that post we used examples from Hey, our preferred Lens client at the time.
Hey has now gone offline.

https://hey.xyz/g/0x523eA3d69FB88EF7F1e9EaEF6cC9b8E0c4cab86E

We have no idea if it will come back online but the X posts certainly don't paint an optimistic picture (note the dates).

Read more on X

A tale as old as web3 social

If you're familiar with web3 social you'll know this story well. If you're new, get familiar with the risks.

Here's just a couple of networks we've used and enjoyed over the years. All our content on each of them is now gone.

https://www.solarplex.xyz/

https://grillapp.net/

Hey is on Lens. Your content is on Lens.

On the face of it Hey is yet another app we've lost content (and followers) to...right?
No Hey is on Lens. Our content exists on Lens NOT Hey. So all we need to do is use the references to our content on Lens to find it (and the rest of our assets) on another Lens app.

For purposes of this exercise we'll be using Soclly, but this works for any Lens app.

It's a simple process:

Take our Hey post (which is inaccessible): https://hey.xyz/posts/1w7gk1wcj78187081pe
Copy the content reference from the URL "1w7gk1wcj78187081pe"
open any post on Soclly (we'll use this one as an example https://app.soclly.com/posts/rpxp9ae3wqgacmc805
replace the content reference in that post with our post's content reference and we get https://app.soclly.com/posts/1w7gk1wcj78187081pe which is our post, only we're now looking at it on Soclly, not Hey.

The same is true for finding our Hey group on Soclly.

Inaccessible Hey group link: https://hey.xyz/g/0x523eA3d69FB88EF7F1e9EaEF6cC9b8E0c4cab86E
Group reference on Lens "0x523eA3d69FB88EF7F1e9EaEF6cC9b8E0c4cab86E"
Navigate to any group on Soclly https://app.soclly.com/groups and replace the Lens reference with ours
we can now see our group on Soclly https://app.soclly.com/group/0x523eA3d69FB88EF7F1e9EaEF6cC9b8E0c4cab86E

What about Bulb?

At this point it's useful to address the obvious problem here: Bulb has the same risk that Grill, Solarplex, etc.. have. Should Bulb suddenly go down, all our content will be lost.
Whilst we LOVE Bulb, we also are realistic. Bulb is a small app in a very difficult market segment (social) in an industry (crypto) which is itself is notoriously hard to create sustainable businesses.

Now we should all, of course, be backing up our posts. However who is really doing this consistently?
And how would you back up your followers or even comments?

Decentralising your Bulb content

Making our content more secure long term is something we'd love to see @BULB Official start thinking about. Whilst it's unrealistic to re-write the entire existing infrastructure to move to a purely decentralised model like Lens, we think there's scope to create decentralisation options for users.

Inscriptions

Kaichi had feature where a user could select to publish a post directly to the Solana blockchain (which is, of course, just a database at the end of the day)

https://docs.kaichi.xyz/getting-started/content-and-feeds

This is done via functionality on Solana called inscriptions https://developers.metaplex.com/smart-contracts/inscription. Pretty much all L1s have a version of this, usually called inscriptions as well.
It is very expensive compared to normal, centralised, storage and the cost increases as the size of the data you're wanting to store increases.

Dencentralised storage networks

Another option is Arweave, who has designed their decentralised storage network specifically to handle use cases like social media.

https://ar.io/social-platforms

Arweave provides the type of cost-at-scale infrastructure which would open the door to possibly moving all your content to decentralised storage. Whilst it's far cheaper than something like inscriptions, it's not free and probably still not cheap enough to offer as a subsidised services (as Bulb offers to users now with their centralised storage).
Possibly an option exists where a user could sign up to a "pro" Bulb service which would then upload all content to Arweave as part of that.
The important part of service like this would be how access to that content would work should the current Bulb app become inaccessible. If that was to happen you'd need some reliable way to continue to access your content in Arweave (like you can with any app built on top of Lens).