I mean, I don't really care about "ownership" of my social graph. What I would care about is interoperability of it. If I can move my graph and associated links from service to service that would be great. But that's basically just a defined format for an "address book" with a unique identifier for each person on it. I'm not sure what value blockchain is adding there.
In this paradigm, the blockchain becomes the single public source of truth/database for everyone's content. And what you mean by 'service' is just any frontend app that consumes and presents this content in a nuanced format for its target audience. So as a builder, you can focus on creating an engaging and valuable experience for your users, providing them interesting ways to engage with each other, monetize content, fund common goods, promote or filter content etc without worrying about scaling your infrastructure.
At the same time, you don't need to rely on the blockchain for anything besides user authorization - nobody stops you from just using Lens as just another sign in flow to your existing web2 social media app and keeping your business model intact, while simply increasing your userbase.
Which blockchain? There's scores of public blockchains.
As for infrastructure, are you high? Blockchains are shared among miners, they're not going to carry massive amounts of data. If you try to decentralized storage like IPFS then you have to maintain infrastructure to have data actually available.
If you try monetizing every social media transaction you'll have no users. No one is going to pay money to post a picture of their breakfast or to change their profile picture.
So in the context of Lens they're probably pointing to cat photos on IPFS in whatever program they have on Polygon. People seem to be maintaining content on IPFS (I'm no expert but I think via pinning services?)
> If you try monetizing every social media transaction you'll have no users. No one is going to pay money to post a picture of their breakfast or to change their profile picture.
I don't think these frontends are trying to monetize everything, as their users would come to the same conclusion you did. Polygon seems to be a lot cheaper than ETH (coinbase says it's like 50 cents vs $1000 for ETH), you can do a lot more on it for less.
I wonder if people will redeploy Lens on cheaper chains if the price goes up 100x or more?
Is this simply because it's not as popular as ETH, or because it's designed to stay cheap forever?
Does it? Each service has to actually be designed to interoperate with it. And there's nothing about having a legal property right over the data that enables interoperability at all, you can do that with just making the data available for download. XML and JSON already solve that problem in a pretty straightforward way.