Distrikt AMA: Building the next generation social media network on the Internet Computer!
This Wednesday, we invited founders of @distriktapp, @Andra and Vidor, did an AMA in the ICP League community. We talked about distrikt’s vision, growth and future plans. Here is the article.
Introduction
blockpunk:
Welcome to the ICP League community Andra, before the interview, could you introduce yourself?
Andra:
Hi everyone I’m happy to have the opportunity to connect with you all.
My name is Andra Georgescu and I’m co-founder of distrikt. I’ve been working with startups for about 8 years and I’ve fallen down the blockchain rabbit hole in 2017. I’ve also been part of the Dokia Capital team for almost 2 years now and that’s where I first learned about Dfinity.
Vidor:
Hi all, thanks for having us!
My name is Vidor Gencel and I’m co-founder and CTO of distrikt. I’ve been working in the blockchain space for more than 5 years now. Been coding since I was 13 and my focus is on building blockchains and DApps like distrikt. I’ve been working with Aurel and Andra on different projects in this space for several years prior to the founding of distrikt.
blockpunk:
Thank you for the great introduction. We know that distrikt and linkedup have some connection, can you tell us about your team of distrikt and its history?
Andra:
We were very much aware of all the demo apps presented by the Dfinity team and LinkedUp seemed to really stand out to us. Users wanted a better alternative to the current professional social media networks so we saw a lot of potential in developing LinkedUp further. You could say that the idea emerged within Dokia Capital, as Aurel and myself are part of the team there. But it became its own stand alone project when Aurel decided to invest in it and we approached Vidor who joined us immediately.
Then we started growing the team and working on the product. Our team is divided between Romania, Serbia and Switzerland. In Romania we have our design team led by Casandra Cretu, and operational and communications. In Serbia we have the development team, spearheaded by Vidor, and in Switzerland we have Robert our Head of Product and the Open Internet Foundation, that manages and maintains the distrikt platform. The Open Internet Foundation is a Swiss not-for-profit whose purpose is to support the expansion of an open Internet through the development of digital products and services that empower users.
About Vision
blockpunk:
Great to know that Distrikt has such a professional team, let’s start the next question.
According to the introduction about Distrikt, it is a decentralised, professional social media network that empowers users to own and control their own identity. What are the main differences between traditional social media and Distrikt, why do we need Distrikt?
Andra:
There are quite a few key differences that will also point to distrikt’s value proposition. First of all, distrikt will not be tracking and collecting any personal information about its users. distrikt isn’t in the business of trading user’s information so it will not monetise your data. Second, distrikt will transform the user into an active participant in governance. So users will be able to participate in the decision making process regarding the future of the platform.
Benefits
blockpunk:
Interesting, Distrikt won’t track and collect users’ data and benefit from it, users can join the governance. OK, next question is about the Internet Computer.
Distrikt is built on top of Dfinity, the Internet Computer. What pushes the team to build the network on IC, what are the main advantages compared with other blockchain networks?
Andra:
The Internet Computer allows platforms like distrikt to be part of an ecosystem in which they can thrive as decentralized systems, directly on the Internet and free from dependence on proprietary systems. Also, distrikt won’t be faced with platform risk, which is especially important in the context of launching autonomous software.
Vidor:
A smooth development process, similar to traditional legacy IT stack so it’s more familiar to the average developer in some cases.
The fact that Dfinity removes a huge layer of complexity that currently lies between builders and the users that we want to serve is a huge value proposition.
blockpunk:
We know that Internet computer has some unique features, as the databases are running in containers and it holds front-end assets, how does Distrikt take advantage of these features? What benefits does Dfinity bring to decentralized social media networks?
Vidor:
Distrikt utilized two types of canisters: frontend assets canisters and backend canisters holding all the data and the social media logic. Every day we are researching patterns of app development on top of the IC and looking at how to store data in a structured way, media, connections etc. Dfinity with its model allows us to be fully on chain.
Also it’s great that no token is required in order for users to interact with distrikt.
About Social Media
blockpunk:
As a web3 dapp, distrikt is gonna give back users control of the dapp, how can users decide the updates of Distrikt, can you show us its governance?
Andra:
The governance of distrikt will allow users to make proposals, vote on those proposals and decide whether or not they are pertinent to the distrikt vision going forward.
blockpunk:
What is the biggest difficulty in building a decentralized social media network and why should users use Distrikt besides its decentralization feature?
Andra:
There is a real challenge when it comes to decentralized content curation and moderation. There is plenty of room to innovate in this space. Decentralization in and of itself is not the value that distrikt will bring, rather the fact that it is a profoundly user-centric platform that aims to give users sovereignty over their social digital presence. Decentralization is just one of the ways in which it does that.
blockpunk:
How do you think the next generation of social media networks will acquire users from the existing social products as they are mature enough and have a large user base?
Andra:
By educating users about the key differences between traditional networks and the new generation social media platforms. Also incentivization is very powerful when it comes to kickstarting the network effect.
And by offering them powerful community building tools like we plan to with the future development of groups called “distrikts”.
Roadmap
blockpunk:
What is the roadmap of Distrikt, when do you plan to launch the dapp？what’s your plan about the Asia market?
Andra:
We plan to launch the product by the beginning of August at the latest. In this initial version of the application, users will be able to:
- claim their account with their Internet Identity (if they’ve already reserved it);
- create an account with their Internet Identity;
- create their profiles;
- upload profile photo;
- choose from pre-set cover photo illustrations;
- search for users and hashtags;
- add friends;
- publish written posts and use hashtags;
- tag other users;
- like and comment on posts;
- reporting and feedback options;
- keep up to date with project updates through our in-app announcements.
We plan to launch the product by the beginning of August at the latest. In this initial version of the application, users will be able to.
The next step is to add features and iterate fast.
The following additions to this feature list will be a full user profile that showcases a user’s professional projects, milestones and achievements. This will be available quite shortly after the initial launch.
And after that we will add media uploads to posts and profiles, and in app article creation and formatting. All this is in our roadmap to be launched by the end of 2021.
We will publish a more detailed version of our long term roadmap soon!
About Development
blockpunk:
As a senior DFINITY developer, what do you think about the whole technology stack of Dfinit, what are the shortcomings, what infrastructure and tools do we need, and can you give some advice to our developers?
Vidor:
Our team is composed of experienced developers that have built on other blockchain networks in the past years. One thing that clearly differentiates Dfinity is that we can see that its fundamentals are a result of research and innovation. Building in new ecosystems can sometimes be cumbersome due to the lack of tooling but given that we are in the very early days of the IC, the resources provided are quite impressive and we’re sure that we will see them developed even further. Projects like Fleek are already lowering the barrier to entry for many developers and it’s only gonna get easier from now on.
And of course our team is also here to help the ecosystem grow. We’re open to working together with other teams and build tools so we’re confident that every following iteration of developers will have a much better experience.
Community Q&A
Q:
what topics will be approved by Distrikt , when users post articles?
A:
so you can write about any topics but we do have a reporting and flagging system so that the community can curate and moderate content.
Q:
What topics can you clarify? Blockchain . travel, share some information like spam?
A:
We’re a general purpose professional social network and we will encourage people to write anything regarding their profession, interests etc
Q:
Do you think these two features will be strong enough to migrate users from existing social media (say, professional networking sites like Linkedin that is universally hated) to Distrikt? Personally the first one means a lot to me and I would (as a power user on Linkedin) would migrate in a heart beat, but I’m not sure there is a large enough base of early adopters like me who would look this way.
A:
We are actively working on researching incentivization methods to migrate people over. Our mid term goal is to create a framework for building communities that are interested about the same topics. There are plenty of ways to show people that distrikt can be a better alternative and we’re working on an onboarding campaign that will communicate that clearly to average users. Also, as I said, incentivisation is a very powerful tool when it comes to kickstarting a network effect. Not only that but the IC allows us to offer users a seamless and intuitive experience. You will get all the benefits that you are used to as a user of LinkedIn for example, and then even more unique features that bring a lot of value…and get all that without the compromise of paying for it with your data.
Our ealy adopters will surely be people that are aware and sesitive to their privacy and sovereignty when it comes to their digital presence
Q:
When we post and share articles on personal page on Distrikt, will we receive accumulated reward points, if so, does Distrikt build an affilate program?
A:
We’re in the final stages of deciding on token economics and will be publishing a paper soon. The paper will detail all these use cases! But until we have the final version I will refrain from giving more details. Given that we might still change some things I think it’s better that we don’t have confusion later on :)
Q:
Can I sell my data on a no-name basis eventually on Distrikt? Currently I’m being hit by random headhunters all the time on Linkedin. They crave for my networks and contacts. I don’t mind selling my public network data, under certain permission rules with certain incentives. Do you think that would be possible one day?
A:
This topic is the type of topic that we see it being decided by governance of distrikt. Also we believe that the users theme-selves should be the only and ultimate beneficiaries if they decide to sell their data.
Q:
How is your experience of learning and using Motoko language? Any tips on how to get up to speed in this new language? … and Rust, if necessary
A:
We started out with Motoko but decided to go exclusively with Rust since it gives us more flexibility. We’re not afraid of Rust!
Q:
LOL.. that’s interesting… and good to know. It might make sense to go straight to Rust then, if the app is backend heavy?
A:
It optimized some inefficiencies for us and we can develop at greater speeds. Also you are able to use Rust crates which is of huge help in getting things done faster.
Q:
How does distrikt cope with sudden high concurrency, such as 1 billion users interacting online.
A:
There are specific multi-cansiter architectural patterns that we are developing every day. So distrikt scales, IC scales. Our goal is to make every aspect of our system scalable with the IC, so if IC can handle the load (which I have no doubts it will), we could handle the load as well.
Q:
As mentioned above there is a lack of development tools, in the process of developing dfinity applications, which part or tool do you feel is the most lacking and affect the development experience compared to the traditional development model?
A:
We have developed some canister management scripts that help us manage our development environments. Managing and fueling multiple canisters is challen.
Q:
How fast can this re-scaling take place? Even on AWS, if I want to turn on additional 1,000 instances as a devops engineer, it’s not a trivial matter. Can Distrkt/IC respond to such sudden demand spike fast enough?
A:
This was one of our concerns as well, but differently than AWS — IC has available computing resources that can be utilized. A lot of infrastructure management complexities are abstracted out and IC developers don’t need to worry much about them.
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