Summary: BYOF is best understood as an early portable-follow-list prototype rather than as a full social network. Its core mechanism is to separate a user’s follow graph from any one application by storing a minimal address-plus-following-list record in a Ceramic-based data model controlled through DID tooling. That makes it a useful historical comparison class for Ethereum Follow Protocol, Lens-style social graphs, and other identity-layer social primitives: BYOF shows an offchain, gasless attempt to make follow relationships portable before later systems pushed more ownership and coordination into onchain registries and richer social protocols.
What it does:
Proposes a portable social graph where users follow Ethereum addresses and carry those relationships across web3 applications
Describes two product surfaces: a dashboard for inspecting followed addresses and an open API for integration into apps that depend on social relationships
Uses Ceramic, 3ID Connect, Self.ID, and DID tooling to authenticate and store graph data offchain
Publishes a minimal BYOF data model whose schema stores an address plus a followingList array
Emphasizes gasless writes by keeping follow operations offchain rather than on an L1 or L2 registry
Frames portability as the main value proposition: applications can import an existing web3 social graph instead of rebuilding contacts from scratch
Key claims:
The README’s central claim is straightforward: centralized platforms keep social graphs closed, while BYOF tries to let users carry follow relationships between crypto-native apps.
The most revealing primary-source detail is how minimal the published schema is. The durable primitive is not a feed algorithm or reputation system; it is simply a user address plus a list of followed addresses.
The architecture matters because identity and storage are delegated to Ceramic-era DID tooling. That means BYOF’s trust model is much closer to portable profile data than to onchain registry ownership.
The prototype is explicitly offchain and gasless, which is analytically useful when comparing it to later systems like Ethereum Follow Protocol that push ownership and management authority into onchain objects.
BYOF mixes together product ambitions that later stacks often separate: a storage layer for the graph, an API for reuse, and a dashboard for discovery. That makes it a useful historical example of an early attempt to unbundle a social app into reusable identity data plus interface layers.
This entry belongs in the corpus not because BYOF became a dominant protocol, but because it captures an early design fork in crypto social: offchain DID/Ceramic portability versus later onchain list ownership and downstream client interpretation.
Whitepaper: No canonical BYOF whitepaper or litepaper surfaced in this pass. The strongest primary materials were the official repository README, the model-creation script, the published schema, and repository metadata; see ../whitepapers/byof-primary-sources-2026-05-10.md.