A social media app to give communities political autonomy

[glensimister]

Hi guys!

So i’m working on a project. It’s an open-source social media application that is designed to give communities political independence [screenshots below].

I won’t provide a full explanation, as there are many features and ways that it can be used. Essentially, money goes in to the application via the lottery, adverts and Land Value Tax (although it’s not a real tax). This money gets redistributed in the form of credits, which can be used in many different ways. I consider the application to be ideologically independent. By that I mean, it’s a Libertarian version of Socialism, as it is based on incentives as opposed to coercion.

Below is an example of one possible use case…

• Communities play the lottery.
• Proceeds from the lottery get redistributed in the form of Social Credits.
• Social Credits are donated to the Land & Housing public service.
• A member of the community will be elected to use this money to buy land, break it into plots and establish a rental value for each plot. The land now belongs to the community.
• Users can register a plot and pay LVT into the application.
• On these plots we can install free-standing, flat-pack, modular housing units - built using aluminium profile technology.
• Using the revenue from LVT/lottery/ads, we can buy more land and repeat the process.

Additional notes:

• It will use lots of plugins (e.g. crypto wallets, dating apps, rideshare, and so on).
• Everything is priced in an index. Similar to Crypto20, the index will represent the average value of the top X number cryptocurrencies.

The front-end still needs a lot of work. I’m not technically a developer, and so i’d really appreciated some help with the back-end stuff.

OK, so the next issue is deciding which technologies to use. I don’t want to use a Blockchain for the app. I profoundly appreciate Satoshi’s work, but I can’t overlook the scalability issues. Not only that, but who wants their drunken status update to be recorded on an immutable ledger?

The SAFE network looks great. They have a good community who are helpful and transparent. The PARSEC consensus protocol looks really cool. However, I have no idea when the SAFE network will be ready.

So…i’m looking into various other technologies such as Solid, Beaker browser and GunDB, although i’m open to any other ideas. The idea is that personal data will stored in a Pod, Beaker will serve the application files, GunDB will provide the database, and the Crypto stuff will done using universal wallet APIs. If there is any other useful tech or API’s, i’ll use them, as I want this app to be a modular as possible.

The Beaker browser (beakerbrowser.com) is a peer-to-peer browser that supports http, https and dat. You can publish, edit and serve files directly from Beaker. If possible, I would prefer it if this could done as a browser extension - similar to the “Web Server For Chrome”. Perhaps Solid, Beaker and GunDB can be packaged as a Chrome extension? Or maybe just a Solid Server?

GunDB (gun.eco) is a P2P graph database engine, which resolves merge conflicts using string comparison. It is lightweight (just one js file) and easy-to-use (similar to Firebase).

So those are my initial thoughts. I’d greatly appreciated some feedback - although help building it would be even better

[happybeing]

I suggest you look into building on Solid, ie build you app in top of Solid protocols (LDP, WebID etc), because these are powerful and will give you portability, so you can switch to a serverless decentralised protocol later if a suitable one takes off (hint ).

I think Solid is very suitable for this. I began looking at remoteStorage.js for similar reasons (the two are similar in this respect) and ported my first apps to SAFE Network alpha 1 by adding a remoteStorage.js compatible backend for SAFE.

Later I discovered Solid and did the same for that, using LDP.

The great thing about these three projects, which is very encouraging, is that they all see value in a simple server, and moving complexity into the browser/client. This is what makes portability possible - minimal complexity to move from one backend to another. Essentially just emulating a relatively simple storage protocol. And they all support user ownership of data, and portability of data from app to app.

Obviously it is more complex than that, it’s software after all , but worth investigating. I plan to come back and do more of this at some point, but am busy on a different project for now.

Your project sounds very interesting BTW, so please post about where I can follow it. Hope this helps, and good luck.

[glensimister]

Thanks Mark. Has the Maidsafe team connected with Tim yet? It would be great to see a bit more collaboration

I created a Pod but couldn’t do much with it and there were lots of usability issues. If I had the time i’d jump in and help out with the UI. Anyway, I’ll try again later…

[happybeing]

I understand the have been discussions. I think there is potential for collaboration too, but both teams are busy getting important things in place atm.