Hello, Cartesi community!
My name is German, and I have been involved in the blockchain field as a developer (project, business and software), manager (teams, promotion and advertising), and simply as an enthusiast since around 2016-2017. Over the years, I have collaborated with different teams on different networks like Ethereum, IOTA, Polkadot and Tezos. I discovered Cartesi quite recently, and, as a fan of cypherpunk and a Linus Torvalds follower, the concept of blending a rollup with Linux infrastructure and incorporating Linux into smart contracts, obviously got me hooked.
To cut the story short.
I want to build a social network called Cartum on Cartesi. I had a conference call regarding this topic with Shaheen, Gabriel, Jathin, Joao and Marcus two weeks ago, and it looks like the team is positive. What took me so long with this post? - development docs, discussions with the team (we are a team of two at the moment, but will hire 1-2 dev-designers as a freelance). I will apply with Cartum for a Cartesi grant. Before I do so, I would like to present the project to the community.
So, Cartum is a social media platform that empowers users with control over their data and interactions. The protocol will be distinguished from other platforms by its foundation of decentralised data access, data ownership, and censorship resistance. What we see to be our biggest “positional difference” is enriched tooling for developers and advanced monetisation tools for content creators. How?
The platform is being developed as a set of plug-and-play Smart Services* or SmartSOA (smart service-oriented architecture), providing users with the ability to interact with other users, as well as interact with other services in the blockchain ecosystem based on an open API: marketplaces (showcasing, buying, and selling NFTs), DeFi services (buying and exchanging tokens), games (authorisation, messaging), and so on.
I’ll give some examples of Smart Services we are currently working on and the actual network structure:
Registration Service
Registers new users and sets up their personalised Smart Services. What’s so special about it? Well, as we see the registration of new users as an SBT or NFT (as if an avatar), it would be cool to allow other developers to use it for their services. Surprise–surprise, that is exactly what we are planning to do - to create a standalone service. We will call it the Avatar and make it the first milestone of social network development 
User Smart Services
Store, manage and enable user data interaction. We believe that User and Registration Smart Services will allow the community to work towards on-chain reputation solutions in the future (in addition to the existing tools).
Message Service
Messaging as a standalone service will allow to use it in games and any other protocol in the network. Potentially, it will shift the Web2 / Web3 comparison by allowing tagging users from different services.
Advertising Service
Enables advertisers to create and run promotion campaigns, rewarding content creators who share their content directly, according to rules set in the Advertising Service. That correlates with the famous Onchain Ads from Coinbase 10 builders’ ideas.
Donation Service
Allows users to support content creators they find interesting. Directly and avoiding the “Google-Apple”-service fee.
NFT Marketplace Service
Facilitates the direct sale of NFTs created by authors. Together with the token transferring functionality, the NFT marketplace service will turn into the on-chain capital formation service. Hopefully, with the development power of the community and the open API.
Voting Service
Allows users to participate in voting. Wut voting??
You see, we split the functionality of the system into three logical user roles:
- Author functionality
- Reader functionality
- System administrator functionality
So, if author and reader roles are a no-brainer, the administrating function goes against the idea of the decentralised social network. With the possibility of spreading forbidden content on one hand and the love of suing teenagers on the other, it is obvious, that some sort of moderation is necessary. We perceive the solution as incorporating a DAO-like functionality, enabling the community to determine what is deemed appropriate and what is not. In the beginning, however, before we will grow the critical mass of users, we will have to do the moderation manually. Let’s discuss how to make it as open and decentralised as possible.
There are many good things to add, I can do it the whole day (c), so please, lads, let’s talk about it if you, as a community, want to see a social network on Cartesi and will use it. Let’s talk about it here or on Discord (I’m antsuwale or antsuwale#0337).
). The main reason is that I would like Cartum to be accepted by Cartesi as a whole. We need it as developers - to see the interest in something we have been already working on for a year or so. Once again, I think it will be fair to counteraction the potential scam from our side by simply not accepting our work on a milestone-by-milestone basis, so Cartesi is covered here.
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