Re: Mosaic Intro

On Tue, 12 Feb 2019 at 03:19, Adam Lake <adam@mosaic.social> wrote:

> Hi Melvin,
>
> Thanks for the input, replies are inline.
> On 2/10/2019 9:16 AM, Melvin Carvalho wrote:
>
>
>
> On Sun, 10 Feb 2019 at 01:25, Adam Lake <adam@mosaic.social>
> <adam@mosaic.social> wrote:
>
>> *Hi All, *
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> * It is great to see so many passionate and capable people in this group.
>> I am sorry to have missed the kick-off call but hope to make the next one.
>> My interest in Solid is the power of its principles to enable a more free,
>> open, and cooperative Web and world. To me it represents the promise of
>> coming closer to the original vision for the Web, a platform that would
>> increase human capacity, our political and economy health, and our
>> collective intelligence. My assessment is that individual sovereignty on
>> the Web, an extension of civil rights in the digital age, is a fundamental
>> requirement to achieving these broader social ends. Solid’s data ownership
>> and data portability architecture are critical pieces of the puzzle. I am
>> probably preaching to the choir! My role is to help “bring people together
>> to build the next generation Web”. You can learn more here
>> https://mosaic.social/ <https://mosaic.social/>. The objective of Mosaic is
>> to connect teams, technologies, and financing to bring user-centrc (“Self
>> Sovereign”) P2P apps to market. My hope is to facilitate the connection
>> between disparate parties that may not know about each, but who together
>> can provide all of the necessary ingredients required to brings Solid apps
>> to market, have a sustainable business model, and designed to maximize
>> social well being. The technology is critical, but so are funding, business
>> models, marketing, and psychologists who specialize in human-centered
>> design. The Mosaic website was launched to communicate a basic technology
>> framework (very much still open for debate) and some app concepts to spark
>> the imagination and get dialogue going about what app ideas have the most
>> support (e.g, existing technology, funding, and public demand). I am
>> heavily leaning toward starting with a decentralized Facebook application
>> because it exemplifies the struggle for the future of the Web and because
>> an alternative, or anti, facebook is a simple concept for people to
>> understand. However, choosing this app presents some challenges as there
>> are deep problems around distributed search, fake news, and identity to
>> solve. These issues may prove to be intractable problems but I think it’s
>> worth systematically exploring whether a good decentralized and Solid-based
>> Facebook could be designed. Opinions on these topics are most welcome! I
>> would gladly engage with others in this group around these high level
>> design considerations as well as sustainable and equitable business models
>> for bringing Solid apps to market. *
>>
>
> Looks very interesting.
>
> I've had done some work on a timeline app but I never got a chance to
> complete it, as focus shifted to the server.  The auth doesnt work with the
> node solid server in OIDC mode yet, tho.
>
> demo :
> http://solid-social.github.io/timeline/?date=recent&profile=https:%2F%2Fmelvincarvalho.com%2F%23me
> code : https://github.com/solid-social/timeline
> screenshots :
> https://melvincarvalho.gitbooks.io/solid-social/content/appendixa.html
>
> Thanks a lot for sharing your previous work. I will certainly reference
> them as I create screen mockups
>
>
> I believe darcy is also looking at this route :
>
> https://darcy.is/
>
> I will be reaching out to Darcy shortly to see if there are opportunities
> to collaborate. The more of us working in a concerted manner the better.
>
>
> So, it helps to understand what facebook did well.  They created their
> system based on the idea of giving everything an HTTP URI and growing a
> graph around that.
>
> Porting this idea to solid I think is an excellent idea, and would allow a
> cross origin social network with strong privacy and everyone controls their
> own data.
>
> Seems like a compelling use case, so the question arises as to why no one
> in open source has done this yet.
>
> The answer is that resources are scarce.  And those that have tried
> inevitably have taken on too much.  Such the very common idea of making it
> P2P or creating a new DNS.  Such premature optimizations have never worked,
> and if we have learnt from history are not the best strategy.  It becomes
> tougher still because advocates of protocol X are widespread trying to
> promote their system, whereas solid is just the web with more cross origin
> features unlocked.
>
> I think that resources are scarce in part because Web 3.0 does not have
> clear business models. Decentralized systems are hard to fund because it's
> difficult to build in an ROI for investors without introducing new fatal
> problems, like token speculation. I think there is a middle way, to attract
> investors without sacrificing the mission of the effort. My current theory
> is that a good design, communicated well and back by a solid team, can
> raise the requisite funding. There are also many unconventional investors
> that actually care about making the world a better place. These investor
> communities, for the most part, likely don't know much about the Web3
> movement and have likely never heard of Solid.
>

Funding models are tricky yes.  The ICO phase was about promising investors
ability to monetize a protocol, rather than, a platform.  The pitch being
that if you could invest in a part of the internet back in the 90s wouldnt
you want to do it.  Then when the protocol takes off you get a share of
everything.  It succeeded in getting funds, but most just became a token
for speculation.  I think many investors got burnt and a few are getting
smarter.  Most of the things these tokens offered can now be done on the
lightning network, so the technical argument is weaker.  What is not
explored yet, however, is what solid brings to the mix.  A semantic layer
on top of a payments system offers incredible possibilities, which 2-3
coins are starting to play around with, now.

I think a better way would be when payments are added to social networks,
to make it a level playing field.  Where people offer services, including
those that created the platform.  And the users can use the tokens to buy
stuff inside the network, give to each other, or use to help curate
content.  Then have games where you can use those tokens and earn more.
But importantly, instead of creating a huge pot for yourself, a premine or
a developer tax (I think investors are getting wise to this quickly), you
tie it together with an existing fair economy like the lightning network
(which is essentially bitcoin v2).

There is going to be an explosion of payments innovation this year, where
things are going back to the grass roots.  A social network based on the
solid graph, rather than the facebook graph is really compelling.  Mainly
because no one has tried it yet.  You can then layer services, games,
utilities on top and create a revenue stream.  This can be fed back as a
dividend to the original investors.  If done fairly, I could see a lot of
demand for that.

>
>
> Doing one thing well which is porting social network functionality via a
> graph of URIs can be easily realized if we have someone to code it.  A
> small team, or even a single person, could realize this in a few months.
> The prototyps of facebook was apparently coded up in about 2 weeks.
>
> Solid is an ideal technology to achieve this.  But the danger is going off
> piste and tagging on the latest social protocol du jour and ending up with
> an architecture inferior to facebook.  There was a massive opportunity
> missed by the social web working group imho when I suggested this route,
> that the social web about people, friends and connections.  Whilst I
> thought this was self evident, it idea was rejected, in favour of building
> a microblogging system.  Well that worked, but we sacrificed social
> networks on the altar of the micro blog.
>
> Id suggest doing one task well ie porting social networks to solid, then
> think about adding more protocols.
>
> It absolutely makes sense to avoid scope creep. On thing I am currently
> fairly attached to is useful and user friendly group/community
> functionality because I think it could be key to scaling. It might not
> belong in the MVP, but hopefully the design can lend itself to adding
> group/community functionality for V2.
>
>
> What is needed?  You need a timeline, you need profile management, a
> friendship graph.  You need friend requests.  Messages, replies and likes.
> It can either be done as one system or in modular parts where different
> groups work on different aspects and then a team ties them together in a
> single app.
>
> Id suggest working out what is in scope and what is not, and trying to
> make something as minimal as possible.  Then trying to achieve a rapid
> prototype.  Perhaps work together with darcy if they are going to build a
> solid solution
>
> Yes, all makes sense, thanks a lot for the input Melvin!
>
>
>
>>
>> * Kind Regards, Adam Lake *
>>
>