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WASP — Worldwide Ad-free Social media Project

Aat de Kwaasteniet
Coinmonks
6 min readNov 22, 2020

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Aat de Kwaasteniet
22–11–2020 Version 1.0

Objective WASP

Designing a (paid) social meeting place on the internet as a replacement for the “free” social media platforms such as Facebook, instagram, twitter, youtube etc. All of which have a revenue model through data mining, profiling and/or advertising revenues. At WASP, users are completely freed from marketing activities around her/his account. So no data mining, no profiling, no ads and so on.
Conditions to reach the goal are:

  1. No data is collected and no profiling of users is done.
  2. Work is done via an app, so WASP is not web based.
  3. The app is open source.
  4. No ads will be placed in the app.
  5. No one outside WASP will be able to be approached with an ad or marketingproposal.
  6. As little data of the account as possible will be stored on central servers (so in fact only the signature code, profile picture and the sent messages).
  7. No verifiable data needs to be entered. (The user must therefore check whether the friendship requests really belong to his friends by means of email or telephone verification, for example)
  8. All stored work data will be removed from the servers after a certain period of time (maximum one month).
  9. Payment of the (subscription) costs is done via cryptocurrency Gulden (NLG) because Gulden allows micropayments and the technique of Gulden has been developed so far that the handling can be done neatly and without much transaction fee.
  10. The app to be developed is provided free of charge.

Registration

An account is created by choosing a username and a profile picture. A unique signature code is generated from the combination of username and profile picture (which will not be entirely visible so the signature code cannot be generated outside WASP). The signature code plus username forms the basis of the WASP ID. An anonymous Gulden address of the user can also be attached to the signature code.
No email address or other social media account will be used to trace the user in case the servers are hacked.
Registration is only possible by paying a one-time registration fee of, for example, 500 Gulden (+/- €3,50) . The purpose of the registration fee is, in addition to collecting a starting capital, only to prevent the (automatic) creation of many spam accounts.

Login

Anyone who has registered within the app can start a WASP session. When logging in, the Gulden app will open automatically and the correct amount will already be entered and the user only needs to enter his pincode and authenticate the payment. Whether a payment has been made is tracked through your account on the WASP servers. So if you have already paid once in the last 24 hours you can continue right away. After payment you have 24 hours free access. As said, the fee is paid in Gulden and amounts, for example, 10NLG per session of 24 hours. The amount of the fee depends on the Gulden rate and is now at moment of writing +/- 6 Eurocent/24 hours. So if a member wants to make permanent use of WASP it will cost him a maximum of approximately €22,- per year. (All amounts are of course still proposals). The user only pays for the time he uses WASP (in blocks of 24 hours).
The amounts paid are used to keep the servers running and to pay the other costs.

Operation

After logging in, the user can receive and/or send messages to “friends”. These messages are provided with his signature code and timestamp and are not encrypted. The user decides whether the message is public and can be read by everyone or only by friends. Messages can consist of text, photo files, movies, etc. and will remain on the server for a certain time, but to a maximum of one month. The user can choose to download the messages of his friends or to leave them only on the server so they will not be accessible after a month.
The timestamp is useful because it avoids the need to search the entire database every time. When someone logs in, the app passes on the timestamp of the last message so that the time to synchronize can be limited.
A member can link friends to his account through a friendship request similar to facebook. Searching for friends can be done in two ways. Browsing in the WASP database to username/profile photo, or the user can specifically access people via another medium (e.g. email, whatsapp etc.) to share their username. After which a friendship request is started by one of the two parties. The responsibility lies entirely with the user to handle the invitations carefully.

The (approved) friendship link is stored in the app. The app can then look on the WASP server if, based on the friendship links in the app, a friend has placed something and displays it in the app. In the app, the message will remain there as long as the user wants it to be for as long as the user has indicated that the messages should be downloaded automatically. If this is not indicated then the message will be removed from the server after a month, even if the user has not opened the app for more than a month and has never seen the message.

A new friendship link will only result in the message flow from the date of linking so a new friendship link will not result in a waterfall of old messages.
After logging in, the WASP app will be the first to display the messages of the friends that have not yet been seen/read by the user. After the friendship messages other public messages are visible based on the order of the timestamp.

If you are not friends you can only send a friendship request to the other person. Any other form of communication within WASP is absent.
Because there is a Guilder address connected to the account of all users, Guilders can also be transferred within the WASP app to friends. But the Wasp app opens the separate Guilder app and has no wallet function of its own.
Because it is a paid service there will probably be less spam accounts. In addition, a karma points system is used to keep track of whether a user is behaving badly. If a user is judged negative by friends with negative karma points, the user can automatically be removed after exceeding a threshold value to be determined. A deleted account can of course just create a new account but that will cost him a new registration fee and the old circle of friends will have to be rebuilt. This creates a self-cleaning system.

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Aat de Kwaasteniet
Coinmonks

Written by Aat de Kwaasteniet

405 Followers

Pensionado, and crypto-lover

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