Many hive communities depend and use Discord daily for reasons, such as:
- there is no chat support for communities.
- discord is convenient and can be accessed with a click of a link.
- people not on hive can participate.
We can notice that this dependence clearly shows us that there is a use and need for such application. Communities need a space for chat and if they do not find it in hive ecosystem, they look elsewhere.
Let's imagine that we could create a similar app:
In the above picture we can see a design of a similar app. The difference is that there are no chat servers, but rather hive communities. And each hive community can customize and moderate their chat space. On the right side, we can see the use of hive community roles and hive usernames subscribed to the community.
What benefits would such app bring...
- Message authentication: if a hive user posts a message, the app verifies the authenticity by checking its signature.
- Promoting hive ecosystem: if the app proves successful, instead of sharing Discord links, communities would posts links to apps in the hive ecosystem
- On-boarding users: guest/lite accounts can check, post messages depending on community settings.
- Encrypted communication: a channel can be public or encrypted, private messages would only be encrypted.
- Decentralized system: more on this point below.
- Open source.
- API: since the app would be decentralized and opensource, programmers could write chat bots just like they do on Discord, or they could create a customized front-end or embed the chat in their application
- Potential to add additional features and integration with hive or with current discord servers.
Message authentication
One of the key features of decentralized chat app is message authentication. Without proper message authentication, anyone could impersonate any user. In other words, such application would be unreliable. That's why this is a key feature.
Decentralized system
Generally, chatting apps work by connecting to a server, which keeps track of who is online, stores chat logs and passes messages. In a distributed system, there is more than one node and data is duplicated across the network.
From the point of view of users or communities, they will not have to deal with the trouble of running any nodes as long as there is at least one public node running.
A public node is a node that would serve all hive communities, and store their chat logs for X amount of time or Y space per channel as configured by node owner.
A private or partial node would serve a subset of communities.
By default, hive communities would use all available nodes, or they could switch to a whitelist configuration.
Additional features
Apart from the chat features, the app can display additional information about each hive community, such as the about page, and list of posts.
This proposal is for support for:
- web chat client: opensource, with UI/UX shown in pictures above
- web chat server: opensource, decentralized, chat server
The main features include:
- Message authentication
- Share link
- Chat space customization
- Encrypted communication
- hive keychain login
- Guest/lite accounts
- API
- show community info, posts
This is the list of features for the first version of the application.
You can support this proposal via:
- PeakD: https://peakd.com/proposals/224
- Hive.blog: https://wallet.hive.blog/proposals
- Ecency: https://ecency.com/proposals/224
- Hivesigner
Other ways of support:
One reason for posting this proposal is to see the community reaction and to find out about your opinion on this application. If you got an idea of a feature, or are up for a more technical discussion on points mentioned above, feel free to do so. Also if there are others who are doing a similar application, I welcome collaboration.
Past Work:
In hive ecosystem:
- WIP Hive Front-end: https://pgmshare.com/
- HiveReblogger app that reblogs posts (https://hivereblogger.com/)
- HeartFlowers Minigame (https://flora.mirafungames.com/)
Other relevant:
- KickAround Live: Real-time multiplayer soccer game, which also includes a chatting system (https://mirafungames.com/)
Thank you for your attention! 🌻