Those of you who have been following along are likely familiar with our latest rebrand from JUNTO to Flux. Though our appearance has changed, our purpose remains the same: to enable sovereignty, free expression, and high impact collaboration.
From day one, we’ve been inspired by the potential this has to collectively unlock the deeper wealth of our shared humanity and we’re excited to share how our vision has evolved to facilitate that.
Beyond Social Media — From Junto to Flux
What we’re building at Flux is the social layer for the new web. Flux enables communities to create their own decentralized networks and self-organize with the autonomy, flexibility, and tools they want and need.
We made communities our focus because:
- The main feedback from our centralized beta was that people wanted dedicated community spaces and tools, more so than having a global social space centered around personal sharing.
- Decentralized social coordination is one of the most exciting value propositions of web3, yet there is still a large gap to be filled. Many crypto projects, communities, and DAOs still use centralized services like Discord, demonstrating a clear opportunity for a decentralized community platform to emerge.
- Serving communities with clear, shared purposes felt higher impact than building a generalized social media solution. Building tools for communities also empowers them to manage their own moderation, infrastructure, and permissions without centralized oversight.
With the new version of Holochain becoming stable as well as the co-development of a new protocol called AD4M, by Nicolas Luck and our co-founder Josh Parkin, we decided to build our fully decentralized community platform from scratch leveraging these promising new technologies.
Here’s how it all works:
Powered by Holochain and AD4M
Holochain is a blockchain alternative where anyone can build decentralized apps that are both scalable and free of cost. This means all your communication on Flux runs without any central servers and is completely peer-to-peer, private, and free from censorship.
As for AD4M, this is a middle-layer solution that enables seamless integration between apps, whether they are are using Holochain, blockchains, or even centralized backends. It is the core innovation of the Perspect3vism project, which envisions a new web where all apps are interoperable.
More details on this later in the article.
Community-centered
With Flux, you can create public or private communities of any size. Each community has their own channels, which are simply different types of spaces for communication. By nature, each channel is its own fractal community that contains a membrane of unique members, permissions, as well as visual representation of that membrane’s information. For example, a channel could be for group messaging, documentation, or longer-form social posts, each with its own list of members and privacy settings.
One-one-One or Group Messaging
The first channel type we’ve built for communities is Group Messaging, which comes with the standard instant messaging, emojis, gifs, and replies.
You can also create one-on-one or small group DMs without needing to spin up an entire community. Flux can be as lightweight as an alternative to WhatsApp and Signal or as robust as a full-featured community platform.
Knowledge Base
With Flux, you can also document what’s important to your community and make sure everyone’s on the same page. Simplify the number of tools you manage by hosting your communication and wiki in the same place.
In addition to wikis, communities can create views for organized, longer-form discussions that can be easily revisited at any time.
Dynamic Personal Sharing
All the tools we’ve built for communities can also be leveraged by individuals to create a multidimensional space for their profiles. In Flux, profiles are constructed the same way as communities, which enables a much more dynamic and fluid means for personal sharing.
Today’s popular social media sites often encourage a one dimensional representation of who we are — on Twitter, it might be our crypto interests, on Substack or Patreon, it may be a singular point of expertise, and on Facebook or Instagram, it may be carefully-crafted highlights of our personal lives.
With Flux, you can create multiple threads with different channel types to represent the full scope of who you are and what you care about. You can manage who you want in each space and in the near future, even implement payment walls for people to access certain content.
What’s Beyond the Horizon
Everything mentioned here is the beginning of what is possible with the horizons the new distributed internet provides us. The initial iteration of Flux can be as lightweight or robust as you want, whether you simply want a secure alternative to the messaging apps you’re used to or a more decentralized, Discord-like alternative with group messaging, documentation, longer-form posts, and a dynamic space for personal sharing.
We envision Flux to be the social layer for people to self-organize in a decentralized and autonomous manner. Whether it’s done by our team or by people in the open source community, Flux will eventually support an even broader scope of functions— things such as multi-sig treasuries, distributed governance, video streaming, and NFTs.
There are already several great teams working on each of these components, such as Colony for deGov and Livepeer for decentralized video encoding, which is why it’s important for Flux to interoperate with any infrastructure.
This is where AD4M comes in.
AD4M — The Agent-centric Distributed Application Meta-ontology
AD4M serves as a spanning layer to enable seamless integration between any type of data structures, whether they are Holochain DNAs, blockchains, or centralized backends.
To better understand the AD4M ontology, let’s take a look at how software development looks like in today’s ecosystem. Developers describe certain functions the user interface must understand in order to communicate with it. As a result, UIs become closely coupled with the backend it is built on, as well as the specific use cases of the application itself.
Often, this creates silos where applications become platforms with little maneuverability. Even in the current web3 landscape, apps are married to the tech stack they are using, leaving out the rich possibility of threading together services from different distributed ledger technologies.
What AD4M does is distills the development of single and multi-user applications into 3 broad ontological units:
- Agents — humans with their devices, represented by Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs)
- Languages — modules that encapsulate the logic to communicate with its respective backend in order to create and receive data (Expressions)
- Perspectives— context and association between expressions, which always belong to an Agent and can be shared with other Agents to create Shared Perspectives, or Neighborhoods
As you can see, this is a meta-ontology that does not make any assumptions about the specific implementations, which means all apps are mutually interoperable and carry little constraint as to what integrations can be built.
So what does this all mean, and what does it enable?
- Though Flux uses Holochain for fast, server-less communication, all of our front-end code is actually communicating directly with AD4M through the usage of Agents, Languages, and Perspectives.
- This means Flux is technology-agnostic. Each component of Flux is actually its own interoperable and independent micro-application that can be plugged into other environments that utilize the AD4M ontology.
- This also means any other AD4M app can be plugged into Flux
Extensive Integration
Already, Flux is leveraging Holochain for shared community graph data and Storj for larger file storage. We‘ve begun exploring Livepeer for video streaming, Ethereum and Solana for NFTs and financial transactions, Colony for distributed governance, and IPFS for additional file storage.
In this light, Flux is not restrained to any one distributed ledger or blockchain, but instead leverages the best use cases from a variety of infrastructures.
Communities themselves can also extend their social infrastructure with new tools created by themselves or the open source community, without needing to wait on the Flux core team to develop them. The open source development of these features will be incentivized by AD4M’s token economics.
Flux as a dWeb Browser
In essence, Flux is a tree composed of modular AD4M applications leveraging different technologies (Holochain, Storj, etc). Because of this, Flux inherently understands how to communicate with other apps using AD4M.
This means that Flux can notify a user when another individual is using a language (micro-service app) that it doesn’t have. That user is then able to download that language and use it. If they wanted, they could even build their own user interface to visually represent the data how they wanted to.
As a result, Flux will evolve not as a platform, but as an ownership-less toolkit of fluid and interchangeable micro-applications.
Flux & Perspect3vism Partnership
As of March 2022, Flux and Perspect3vism, the organization developing AD4M, have entered into an official partnership where we our teams will be co-developing this ecosystem moving forward.
What’s Next
Try it Out
Though things are still in its early stages, the Flux Alpha is ready for community testing and feedback. Feel free to follow this guidebook to give it a run and let us know what you think!
Invest in Flux
We’re bringing on a handful of investors who want to help build one of the first, scalable social infrastructures of the new internet. Feel free to reach out to me at eric@fluxsocial.io to get a conversation going.
Additional Resources
This article is meant to serve as a general update of our current state of development. We will soon release the Flux light-paper, which will go into even more detail on our vision, product, and technical implementations.
The Perspect3vism team is also working on a white-paper that will lay out their vision and token economics. In the meantime, feel free to:
- Join the conversation on Discord
- Follow our development on Github
- Check out the new Flux website
- Read more about Holochain
- Learn more about Perspect3vism and its AD4M ontology
