Lifting all boats: how messaging interoperability standards can make the new web

Transcript

yes hi everyone well thanks for being here i know it's the end of a very hot day and i'm very glad the aircon is working now so and if you're here i'm really appreciate it so just short on who am i i've i've been around for a while i've like i founded some stuff i tried a bunch of stuff saw some a lot of didn't work but uh but i've been i've saw a lot of markets and bears and bows and one thing i am not is a trader i never really cared that much about where the market is going up or down or or focus on that

and i and i do think that we like people might have come for the casino right i think it's obvious people come from for like because they are they want to make money but if they stay around it's on us the builders the people who are building things the dreamers who have people who have a vision and if everyone went away when the casino stopped then that's also our fault right and i think and we should ask ourselves like did we give them a purpose did we give everyone who came a dream oh no it's cutting down there but it should be give them purpose so i work on an ass especially if you look at doing public goods on ns and why why does dns care about social

media and decentralization like this so enes became only half accidentally a decentralized profile for apps if you login into any june app you have your ens name on on the on the on the top there and it's nice because suddenly you don't need to create a new password you don't need to create set up a new profile everything is just there they recognize you you have your nas your units and your information is there so so we care we we care about the future of social media and i've done a few a little experiment back in march in which i just asked around who is building who's building that who's been in the next discord or mayo on on on crypto and you've got a lot of

interesting answers and here's what i found out there's a team doing outer mail it allows you to message any initial address and create token gated communities there's a team called nftchat allows you to message any turn-based address and allow you to create token gated communities there's a team called dns mail allows you to send a message to any address and there's a team called common groud allows you to create token gated communities and message any html address there's block scan you've seen nothing below on actually editor scan allows you to guess what send a message to any turn-based message just strike quiet a decentralized social media that allows

you to send messages there's other spaces that allows you it's a center like social media allows you to send messages to i think you get the point right everyone those are just the ones i found every one of those is a sort of decentralized social media that allows you to send messages to one another to anyone with an attorney address and create token gated communities right and i think and sort of the rest of my talk will be sort of like uh why why are we doing that like why are you not doing that together and and because those teams are not like small those are just the teams i found that had like a website or many other builders have told me that oh they want

to be they're going to be building that and what would all of these had in common they want to build decentralized social networks many of them have like solid teams million dollar fundings and you probably never heard of them unless you are working on one of them and they don't talk to each other and i think that's the crazy thing if you create like you can message anyone on nifty chat but you're not going to receive that message if you're using ens mail or a hashchat which actually i just found out about like in in this room like earlier today so we have like over 30 apps all trying to do the same thing decentralized messaging but none of them talk to each other and i think that's just wrong

because a data silo one of the reasons they do that is that that is sort of how the old web works and the data silo is sort of a user mode right you want to create a mode you want to protect your users but most are for medieval castles driving cities they don't have modes they have gates they have highways they have training stations where you can come in and out and what would happen if one of those silos ecosystem like one if let's say nifty shed one then they would be the new silos because they are not sharing their data anywhere and they like why would they right they they are the one winning the the game and but likely they want

because the silo is discord the silo is twitter they are not sharing data with us so like why why right and it sort of becomes an incentive problem because if everyone is building modes if you're the only one who's building a bridge then your compatible competitors will use that to steal your users but if everyone is building bridges and you're the only one just trying to build a mode then people will look at that and say i don't want to i want to use your app i want to be on the other side and then the studio users so what we want to try is a classic prisoner's dilemma where like we want to be here like we want to be where everyone wins but everyone is building

on the direction where is a winner takes all where there's a single guy that's going to take over everything until the next guy takes over everything so how do we solve that problem and of course there's a standards problem because every one of those guys of those those apps they are trying to build their own chat standard and they just hope that everyone adopts their other one right and they're like yeah i mean the others won't suck they should just use mine and then you have another standard so how do you solve the problem how do you make everyone talk together without just creating more and more standards that just proliferate so

i think what we should do is not what ens wants to do is not a new standard what we want to do is a bounty for finding a common minimal denominator right you have your app there are features you have your app there are features but there's something that all of you have in common together so ens is offering a prize money for the first three social media apps that interrupt inter interoperate messages meaning i i write a message on my app it can reach your app your app that app as if it was a native a native app so we are starting right now with 60k from multiple sources

uh and we are looking for price partners to increase that and and we are looking of course for people to apply that and try to figure out what it what it is but here's the thing it doesn't really need to be complicated it doesn't even need a blockchain it just needs crypto but really it just needs cryptography it doesn't need a token all you need is signed messages and i'm sort of looking at lens lens protocol right right now because it's a very cool protocol but it's also super complex allows you to mint uh your nft your profiles and nft where other people can collect and other people can post which is cool for some apps and what matters for others right so i think we

can find something that is even simpler that is also on the lens right i'm not saying again it's not a new standard just whatever we can and i think the minimum requirements we should be using is how data must be self-validating i love this idea of cell validating i it came from blue sky which is a twitter project trying to do open source social media if you send me a twitter post the only way that i can check if it's a real twitter post i have to see if it's on the twitter.com website if it's not it's not real if you send me an ethereal transaction i don't need to check the hrm foundation website i don't need to check eater scan i can check on the transaction itself if it's a valid

transaction or not right so it means that text content should be signed if it's a image content then you just take the hash sign the hash so i i have this image i can check if the hash matches right and all data should be queryable right it doesn't we cannot win this by having everyone have different silos where i have my my own messages you have your own messages and etc what we need is that everyone has a feed of their of messages that they own that not necessarily are belongs them if you that probably does remind you like if

you've been around a while that will probably remind you of the like blogs blog era where everyone had their website and then they had a feed and public open feed where you can catch content the difference here is and that's why self-validating data is so important if you were if you're if you your airsoft is on your feed on your blog you can only put content that you offer on your blog because that data is not self updated but if you sign messages then alice over there can share their posts with bob and bob can collect from alice and then from brian and then he will have on his blog a feed for message from other people which can share with adam that will give

that to i don't know amanda and then that she will be collecting on her feet a bunch of messages that are signed that they know that came from these people and she doesn't need to be checking all those feeds maybe she just needs to check two sources and maybe like that pink guy over there is just receiving a bot and he's the one working as a as a future right so those are the two minimum requirements get the data to be signed so it's everything is self-validated and all data must be openly inquirable in some sort of feed it could be as simple as an aircraft feed of signed messages things that are not even in the scope there's no obligation to use any

specific blockchain there's no need to use p2p bittorrent ipfs or having a key manager that depends on your app right even like which content you keep which content do you filter that's up to each app what we only want is just to have all those social media apps talk to each other and have like a queryable error sign like a feed of signed messages so here's how to profit if you are building a decentralized social media app that allows you to connect to any other hero address and to create a token gated communities just get to other apps talk to them share data and you split the price easy

money right and social media is not one website you think about social media thing about twitter and facebook and etc it's our lives where is where mostly most of our friends are it's where people get married they they find part of life partners they they gather they they create like their content is there like that's our life it cannot be decided by a couple people living in that circle right almost everything about our lives like even like design decisions on how does something look looks or doesn't look is basically decided by someone living again working inside that red circle

and i grew up also on on very on i grew up on history books on very serious history books and that's how you learned that paris used to be like luther an old roman town but perry is still around like the roman empire is gone and then how many empires have gone through what is what we call now with france right and i think communities need to outlive the empires that founded them this this is so important we often on the internet we've we've seen that where you create there is a community that is created by a corporation that cooperation goes

bankrupt so does the community everyone dies with it can you imagine what would happen with cities if when the empire like fell and then the roman empire and then like how many revolutions but the cities stayed there because the attack here is all open source and that's how we get cities to live for a thousand years and that's how we are going to get our social media and our digital cities to live for thousands of years so we want to help the price you want to apply for the bounty contact me at this twitter and this address and also like one last thing uh on ins we just launched also at ensgrants.xyz where you can apply for a quick self-serving grant of one eater

for for each project so that's it thank you for coming for my talk [Applause] i think we have time for questions yeah do you have any questions no so okay so thank you very much i'll be outside you