SUBSTRATM

An open source, platform-agnostic social network protocol leveraging blockchain, RSS, ActivityPub--enabling a decentralized, federated, permanent online presence with full control of your social feed

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Inspiration

Walled gardens and black box moderation of incumbent social media platforms, and the lack of network effect in alternatives. Not being able to trust what you see in your feed and what you don’t. Some form of Gatekeeping as a byproduct of all other attempts.

What it does

Moves the model of federated ActivityPub-compliant social media from servers owned by gatekeepers to the blockchain, putting the power to subscribe to, boost, mute or block anyone purely in the user’s hands.

How we built it

For this portion we built the NFT minting dapp with REACT and Moralis and the proof of concept social media authentication with Chainlink.

Social media authentication by implementing the ChainlinkClient and calling to our own external adapter which authenticated api calls to Twitter.

Challenges we ran into

Real jobs, being geographically spread out with timezones and having to learn everything from scratch... scope creep, communication barriers in describing our individual parts of the elephant.

There was a lot of overhead set up to get an api call through Chainlink and we had to set up a node running locally in order to test. As non-blockchain devs, there were a lot of new frameworks to learn.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Beginning the journey with a loose framework and process that brought our small team together and forced us to grind nebulous ideas through a collaborative process to shake out what didn’t work or rescope/reframe the structure and tranches.

Getting our first chainlink node running and creating our own external adapter and bridge were a huge accomplishment

What we learned

Moralis, blockchain, Chainlink, friendship, comradery, teamwork, team building exercises, zoom call trust falls, how to diagnose a mild concussion, and how to update zoom.

What's next for SUBSTRATM

Frontend, more backend, ActivityPub compatibility, lots of stuff. Find someone who knows a bit about blockchain development to guide us more effectively and a designer to make it look good but primarily to optimise UI.

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