#29Cell Social — Owned Social Protocol
A social protocol where posts are Cells owned by their authors, follows are on-chain relationships, and the social graph is shared state. Authors truly own their content as first-class assets the platform cannot delete; feeds run client-side over user-owned data; tipping flows over Fiber micropayments; users join from any wallet via account abstraction.
- CKB properties
- Cell Model · First-Class Assets · Account Abstraction · Fiber Network
- Primitives
- CCC · Spore/DOB · .bit
- Inspired by
- Farcaster (on-chain identity + off-chain content) and Nostr (censorship resistance)
- Wants
- frontend · smart-contract · product
- Author
- dir
- References
- Nervos CKB Docs — Cell Model · Fiber Network
- A post standard: a Cell (with on-chain or content-addressed payload) owned by the author's lock, readable by any client.
- An on-chain follow/graph standard so relationships are shared, queryable state — not siloed in one app.
- Authors can edit/delete their own posts and no one else can; demonstrate platform-resistance to takedown.
- A client that builds a feed entirely from on-chain data with a client-side ranking algorithm (no server feed authority).
- Tipping integrated over Fiber: a reader sends a micropayment to an author from the post UI.
- Users onboard from at least two different wallets via account abstraction; public demo + docs.
Problem
Decentralized social keeps splitting the baby. Farcaster anchors identity on-chain but keeps content off-chain on hubs; Nostr achieves censorship resistance via relays but has no notion of owned, programmable content objects. In both, "ownership" of a post is convention, not a property the network enforces — a relay or hub can drop your data, and the social graph is effectively re-derived per app. On CKB there is no social protocol that treats a post as a genuinely owned asset and the follow graph as shared on-chain state that any client can read and build on.
Why CKB
The Cell model makes content a first-class, owned asset: a post is a Cell under the author's lock, so only the author can edit or remove it and no platform can delete it. The social graph becomes shared on-chain state rather than per-app data, so feed algorithms are a client concern running over data users own — not a moat controlled by one company. Account abstraction lets anyone join from the wallet they already have (EVM, Bitcoin, passkey) without a bespoke account system. And Fiber, CKB's payment-channel network, makes per-post tipping economical at micropayment scale instead of paying a base-layer fee per like.
Spec
- Post Cell: author's lock + a payload (short posts inline on-chain; larger media content-addressed with the bytes optionally in Spore/DOB Cells). Editing/melting is the author's exclusive right.
- Graph standard: follow/relationship Cells (or a DOB-style relationship object) that any client can query to assemble a graph — shared state, not app-private.
- Identity: built on the omnichain auth layer (#26) and optionally
.bithandles, so users arrive from any wallet with a portable identity. - Feeds: clients fetch on-chain posts + graph and rank locally; multiple competing algorithms can run over the same data.
- Tipping: a Fiber channel integration to stream micro-tips from reader to author directly from the post UI.
Cell Social leans on several other dir ideas: account abstraction from #26, and DOB media patterns shared with the composable-media work (#12).
Mini-demo
A minimal client: log in with any wallet, publish a post (a Cell appears under your lock), follow another account (an on-chain relationship), and see a feed assembled from chain data with a client-side ranking toggle. Tip a post via Fiber and watch the author receive it, then delete your own post to show no one else can.
References / prior art
Compare Farcaster and Nostr for identity and censorship-resistance models, and Lens for an on-chain-graph approach. The differentiator is content as an owned first-class asset (Cell) plus Fiber-native micro-tipping and wallet-agnostic onboarding.