"Akasha Core" by Mihai Alisie || Urbe Talks #10 @AKASHA HUB (ENG)

Transcript

[Music] foreign [Applause] co-founders and before that one of the co-creators of Bitcoin magazine I fully agree with that knowledge most powerful when shared and it made me super happy to see like how all of the things that were presented Kudos or be somewhat hopefully in a future event showed us some cool

collaboration of some sort between what we're working on and what you're working on because that's when the magic happens so um without further Ado so up is a or down how do I change the slides up oh down it went down so it's long okay so with Akasha it was a journey of Discovery and trial and error and error and error and error and at some point success and between 2015 and 2018 our main focus was on understanding if building a fully decentralized social networking app is even possible so so we

started by having pretty much everything on chain we were young and imagining that this scalability thing is going to be solved by next year or so so years later still a working progress that's why I'm saying but this experience taught us also the user experience importance and you know like technologically speaking it was a Marvel when a person would install this application on their computer they would basically install an ethereum client or then their machine and ipfs node and all the publishing and all the social interactions would be happening through this distributed

coolness but loading a post would be slow scrolling through the feed would be slow and all of this stuff so ain't nobody got time for that and then in 2000 uh so it's just a bit of a yep so between 2017 and 2020 learning from the trial and errors we decided to rewrite the entire ipfs part in using ipfsjs so yay in the browser which was also pretty cool because your tab from your browser would talk directly with other tabs from

other browsers because you know decentralization was always something that we try to embed in in the application but without all the burden of installing something and you know all of the Power consumptions because you know people trying to use this from a laptop on their battery would soon find like you know the fans going like like what's going on ah it's just ipfs or ethereum syncing when did you last open it and now ah just uh 10 000 blocks left to synchronize so following this uh it was also interesting to see a couple of books that uh were inspired by some of the ideas that we applied so one of the ideas that we uh tried was this

quadratic voting which uh actually inspired the uh Glenn Weil uh and the Akasha is mentioned in radical uh markets and Primavera the Philippe mentioned the rule of code within this context with social networks smart contracts and you know like preaching to the the choir here and after uh learning also from this experience of writing Akasha for the web and increasing the user experience quality we realized that you know actually we asked ourselves like what's the end game just building one social networking app that uses decentralized Technologies

where the decentralization in that if it's just one social networking app you know it's like and this kind of have led us also to think about okay so because also in the meantime we had like three or four fully functioning decentralized social networking apps and every time kind of like refactoring Yay you know developers flipping the table here we go again and that's how we focused our energy on uh thinking about what would be the fundamental building blocks that would made it easy for other people to build their own social networks using decentralized Technologies and thus it would be more decentralized it's not

just one it's a network of decentralized social networks um so uh oh yeah just see so the Akasha ecosystem today just to give you a brief overview uh comprises of Akasha Foundation which has this mission of developing systems for freedom of mind and human connection uh then we have the Akasha core which is this open source framework for building and distributing composable web 3 apps and Akasha worlds which are these modular platforms enabling communities to self-organize build and access distribute adapts this would be the social media platform so to say and not least and here we are in one of the

the first Akash sharabi in the world we have like this idea of a network of an autonomous physical spaces nurturing collective intelligence and action and the autonomous part is key here and if you see like the keyword self-organizing and decentralization we envision this as a loose network of uh places and the communities that are resonating when it comes to the principles and the values but when it comes to what goes on in the hub and how they organize and what they do and what's the specific topic that they are interested in that's up to each Community to Define its own and and that being said uh just a bit uh

covering briefly the differences between web 2 and web3 uh of course the infrastructure for web 2 platforms is mainly centralized and in this Paradigm we have the decentralized the business model uh for web tool platforms that are basically like these Shenanigans or like I'm using a social app but actually it's an ad platform disguised to three queens like your friend and you like things and hearts and all of the reactions and in this case with web3 we have this luxury in a way and this is like quite exciting for the pioneers and those that are eager to discover new things we have new paradigms that we can explore new ways of generating value and adding value in the community rather than extracting and treating people as the the product and

then the governance usually as you see and you know Twitter sadly is the perfect example of this you know with the guy at the top just deciding today you don't see any tweets tomorrow you do if you're not logged in and all that stuff and in here we are striving towards providing the communities with the tools to self-organize and decide what goes on with the future of the platform that lies at the center of the community here I think man anyway so that was also our last thing here with the relation to data ownership and this touch is also a bit on the knowledge there because we've been tricked into this uh situation where the platforms are kind of like

locking Us in into an interface and with the data that we generate without being able to take this with us and the data ownership part I feel it's a strong value proposition for web 3 in general where participants on their data and going back to the framework itself like some of the building blocks are here and we are striving to reuse and integrate as much as possible the existing projects in the ecosystem and for the base layer we have ipfs ceramic composed DB ethereum and lit lit is also super cool if you want to create all sorts of permissions and things then we have the core itself which is an SDK a design system remote Hooks and uploaders and basically using these things you kind of

combine things in this composable a way to create your own social network or social networking app or platform suited for your community needs and Akasha award is just the first one that we are working on now actively it's kind of like dog fooding and like dealing with the frustrations anticipating the pain points for developers that will do this stuff because breaking changes are not fun and hopefully in the future we will see like a big list of many other worlds out there um yeah we also use this Atomic design system which allows this composability

uh when it comes to the elements that you can have within your social networking app and the atomic design system is super cool because you can compose this into like fully functional apps and when once you have this in your mind when you look at all the apps that are actually pretty basic and simple it's almost like you look at the Periodic Table of something and then you look okay you have that that and that forming the actual app and this is an example of a small piece from what makes a world and in this case this is the editor that helps you to write content basically and the apps that you have installed within the world

provide also this functionality where you can embed interactive blocks within a post so it's not like you're just link for example an nft to an openc link and you open that thing in another tab like the idea is to create this crypto native experience leveraging what web3 can do at its best and in this case you have like an example where you have the polls app and you just create a poll within the the posting but you know this can go really far and really creative and this is maybe one of the low hanging fruits that developers can just begin experimenting with and uh it's going to be fun to to see it evolve and this would be an example of the let's say the

the feed that would be visible when you have the posting there again if you go back to the atomic Design This is a pretty basic and also points towards the flexibility provided by this framework for people that can you know it doesn't have to be looking like Twitter it doesn't have to be looking like YouTube or Reddit or something it can be something completely new or if you do need something that looks like a YouTube type of social networking app that's fine you can customize this to fit whatever you you need then The Vibes or the vibe app this would be uh so to say like a second side of the same coin when it comes to the content that is being broadcasted and consumed by people in

the network and the idea is that we are doing our best to provide the tools for the community to self-moderate and decide on what are the values and the codes of conducts that are accepted within a community and to give you a quick example and this is also has such a big topic when it comes to where moderation ends and when where censorship begins and this has been like on our mind for since we started this social networking Journey but to give you an example if you have a world like cat that worlds and then you have another one like dog that world you know like people in the document it would say like absolutely no cat pictures here we accept only content

that has dogs and Dogma games and then on the cat Community also the same so the thing is that if someone from the cat Community would go in the documentary and post like a meme with the cat the people from the community like dog that world can choose to delete that content from their own uh world right but at the same time because we have this shared data layer and ipfs and ceramic and all that stuff basically what the community from the dog that world does is the listing that content from their own world but the content itself is not removed they are basically removing a copy of that content that is used to improve the user experience you

know like that scrolling nice you just click and things open and at the same time that content because it's not taken down as the original content remains accessible for all the people in kid that world and other words that have nothing against like cute cat pictures so that's just an example on how you can kind have walked this fine line where it's not about finding the perfect moderation system but providing the tools for the communities to create evolve and adapt their own moderation guidelines and then Akasha verse and yes I know everyone is now worth that verse this but this is actually uh uh a name that was coined by vitalik when we had the DEFCON 5 in Osaka and I was trying

to kind of like we're trying to do this thing and it's going to be kind of like an integration Center where people so after he listened to me struggling to explain this I was like ah so it's kind of like an Akasha versus like yes that's that's it so in this case this could be imagine like the equivalent of a play store or an app store where you have like this community contributors coming together and creating all sorts of functionality that you know extends the available functionality for Akasha world but because otherwise would use the core and the shared data layer you can think of like apps that would be developed in one world and from the developer perspective sometimes it's easy to miss the mark So

to say or like to think that your adoption is going to be in a community when you are going to find success in another community that maybe you did not even think of so one example would be some kind of up I don't know voting app that rewards the people that choose the correct winner and maybe in Akasha world is not going to be very useful or used but someone creates fashion that world and then in fashion that world that becomes like the main app because it becomes some kind of a center where designer sends their designs and then I don't know it's going to be some kind of functionality where if people are going to use it there for the developer ultimately it's important to have their creation used out there in the world and

reaching in some way the lives of people so this is quite an interesting proposition also from the perspective of progressive web apps and you know especially lately although we've seen this also in the past The Gatekeepers when they get to decide what crypto apps are you allowed to use on your phone that's kind of a bad situation to find yourself in so this provides you with a kind of a work around that because your apps are going to be available as long as having a browser on your phone is still allowed you know so removing The Gatekeepers that would decide what you have available as functionality in your social network so without taking more

time join us this is still a working progress you can find the repo here scan thank you very much thank you thank you so much