For those of you who might have missed our first AMA, please read the transcript below.
Host: Now to start the AMA, please introduce yourself briefly to the community.
Solcial Admin: Sure, so I’m one of the cofounders of the Solcial project. My background is in financial engineering and I’ve been in crypto for many years. We decided to launch Solcial because we were fed up with the current state of social networks.
Host: Great, could you describe briefly what Solcial is about for those not familiar?
Solcial Admin: Solcial is a decentralised social network allowing users to interact without fearing censorship, and allowing content creators to be rewarded fairly at market value and without middleman.
Our primary goal is to create a platform that helps citizens voice their opinions in a civil way, without government interference or fear of being prosecuted. But as we’re building the platform using blockchain tech, we are able to do much more than that…
Host: So, how does Solcial work?
Solcial Admin: Solcial is a mobile app (iOS and Android), as well a desktop app, and a website. On Solcial each user has their own token, allowing you to invest directly in people. You get minted 1 million coins when you signup, that supply is fixed and the same for everyone. These coins are yours, you can keep them or sell them (or send them to friends).
Then to follow people we have 3 subscription levels: you can follow someone for free (Tier 1) to access their public content (similar to Twitter or Instagram), and to access their private content (what we call Tier 2 and 3 subscriptions) you need to own their token, to be an investor in them. That’s what we called the “invest-for-subscription” model.
We also display your NFTs on a user profile, either just to show off, or to buy & sell your NFTs with your friends. And we have a few more cool features, but I won’t share everything today 🙂.
All user content is stored on IPFS and accessed through a P2P layer that we developed. So it doesn’t rely on censorable servers or gateways. And the token related operations (minting, trading etc) are all on the Solana blockchain.
Host: Also, Do you have a token? How do you make money?
Solcial Admin: Yes we have the SLCL token, the native token of Solcial. It is a governance token, giving you voting power on the DAO, and giving you discounts on trading fees.
We charge 0.5% trading fee on every trade (when people buy or sell the token of anyone), we plan to keep half of these revenues for our own development, and with the other half we’ll do a buy and burn of the SLCL on the market (similar to BNB or FTT)
Host: Oh Great, How are you censorship resistant? Is everything stored on the Solana blockchain?
Solcial Admin: We are building a peer-to-peer (P2P) layer above Solana for all the content related operations (feed, posts, likes etc). And all the tokens related operations (minting, trading, swapping) are done on the Solana blockchain itself. All user content is stored on IPFS and accessed through the P2P layer without relying on censorable servers or gateways.
By building Solcial on a P2P layer secured by the Solana blockchain we are, by design, unable to censor content; if you post something it can remain hosted forever as long as someone, somewhere think this content is important, and cannot be deleted or cancelled by any other party or authority. Although we do have policies in place to prevent illegal and egregious content, no dictator or government body will be allowed to bully Solcial into censoring someone’s content.
Host: P2P Seems promising, Let’s talk about partnerships & investors that you are collaborating with.
Solcial Admin: We are backed by tier 1 investors: Solana Ventures, Alameda research, Rarestone, Newave Capital, NOIA Capital, Genesis Block ventures and more. They all provide us broad support from industry networks to community marketing.
Host: So, Are you open source?
Solcial Admin: Not yet, but we plan to open source our code when the platform is live and ready to live without us!
Host: So we have a few questions from community members as well, @zigbee_space asks “How do you handle moderation for inappropriate content? “
Solcial Admin: So we’re a platform that promotes freedom of speech. Content that is normally banned on dictatorships (like political stuff) should be allowed on Solcial (wherever you live).
But there is content that is not a question of freedom of speech, there is content that is simply illegal (on every country on Earth), like child porn, decapitations, terrorist discussions etc. And that type of content has to be moderated.
Yet we’re a platform that can’t delete content. But we can hide content in the UI through moderation: users can report content that is illegal, and when the ratio of reports/views is above a certain %, we’ll hide the content in the UI and unpin the data from our IPFS nodes. Because the community (as a whole) has voted that this content is disgusting or illegal and should be hidden. But if some community somewhere thinks that this content is important and should be visible, they can just continue to pin the content on IPFS and broadcast it using their nodes. So it will be visible to them via their direct links, but not visible on the UI to the broader audience.
We have also other incentivisation mechanisms to get the community to moderate this social network, this metaverse, but I won’t share everything today 🙂
Here are answers to the questions that were asked by the community.
Q: Will there be a joining fee for starting content generation for getting rewards later? And what type of content generation and sharing will be allowed under $Solcial — videos/memes/graphics/Music etc.
By @hallagullaboy
Solcial Admin: There won’t be any fee for posting content when you are using the decentralised P2P network of Solcial. The fees and gas will only be present when you trade user tokens on Solana.
At first, we’ll only allow users to post text and images, in the future we’ll include more fancy things (videos, audio etc.)
Q: I can’t understand how social media can be decentralised, where all data will be stored, as centralised social Media does? On servers? Seems like it will work like client-server, but actually it means anyway centralised, Seems like will be the same, if not please explain how this gonna work and what makes different for a 5yr child?
will be defi, nft, marketplace, staking, spot and derivatives integrated in solcial?
By @besogno
Solcial Admin: The data is stored on IPFS, and accessed through the P2P network. Essentially each user using Solcial on their phone or on desktop using the Social app, will be running its own IPFS node, broadcasting their data and the data of their friends to other peers (nodes).
We don’t plan to include DeFi, staking and stuff. Only NFTs though, and only spot trading, no futures. We focus on building a fully integrated app, that is simple and intuitive to use, yet very powerful behind the scene. We don’t want to add all the bells and whistles
Q: How are you going to bring users on board? Solcials success seems to rely on onboarding content creators?
By @alphanomicon
Solcial Admin: Excellent question, that’s actually the most important. How to get a network effect. The key to understand is that a social network is a marketplace, you have supply and demand. You have content and users. And to get more users they need to see new content, but to get more content you need new users to post it. So you have a chicken and egg problem to solve early on. And the only way to solve a chicken and egg problem for a marketplace is to start with a small niche, a small group, dominate that market, and then expand.
So here we’re starting with the market we know the best: crypto traders. People will be able to share their market analysis, trading calls etc, and interact together (either to speculate on each other, or to subscribe to their private content, their special insights etc). Once we get enough engagement with these first users, we’ll expand the user base to other groups that are lined up and ready to onboard.
Q: What’s the point of solcial token if content creators have their own? Shouldn’t all things revolve around solcial?
Asks @alphanomicon
Solcial Admin: Well each user token is traded versus SLCL (the Solcial token), so you need SLCL to buy the token of anyone. A bit like Chilliz for the Fan tokens, to buy the football clubs coins like Arsenal or PSG, you trade them versus CHZ.
Q: How are you going to prevent racism, hate speech, porn, political confrontation?
Will there be a fight against bots?
Asks @vazbaz
Solcial Admin: Great question, so people will be able to report content that they judge offensive or illegal. If a post is reported too many times, we’ll unpin it on our IPFS nodes (but the main owner or their friends can still broadcast the content if they think it’s important and the world should see it).
Q: Does Solcial want to become a specific type of social media (eg a video platform like yt or a blogging platform like Twitter) or something completely different/new? What kind of feed-ranking algorithm will Solcial use? Based on what factors?
Solcial Admin: At first we’ll let users post text and image content, and then we’ll offer a wider range of content (video, audio etc). But the direction of the social network will depend on the community, what do people want to use it for. We’re building a generalistic platform, and anyone can use it (whatever their community or interest).
Regarding the feed algo, no your feed won’t be curated by any algorithm — and that’s important. You will see only the people you follow, and in the chronological order of their posts. But we will have other tabs on the app to discover content, and to promote the interesting and popular posts and users.
Q: How’s this gonna work? , we know that every social media has different censorship, like a facebook that is sensitive to lewd and bad content and twitter home of lewd and bad content, whether solcial will pass all lewd and bad content? 😏
Asks @Yawyawyawyaw
Solcial Admin: It’s a bit different model than onlyfans or patreon, on Solcial we use an “invest-for-subscription” model where you can access the content of other people by being an investor in them.
Q: What are the features that solcial will be used to attract new user, better than the other platform. What is the most profitable on Solcial in any way?
Asks @Denywisky
Solcial Admin: Profits and revenues will only be generated from the trading activity, from trading fees.
Q: How much is the gas fees to post, like, comment, follow? If I have NFTs on other Solana DApps will it be interoperable in any way?
Asks @derishaviar
Solcial Admin: There will be no gas fee to post content (on the P2P network), but there will be gas fees to trade user tokens on Solana.
And yes, your NFTs on your Solana wallet will be visible on Solcial, so you can show off your gallery or buy/sell with other people.
Q: What incentives do creators have on solcial to encourage more quality and quantity of content rather than other platforms?
Also by @derishaviar
Solcial Admin : good question, on Solcial you are actually encouraged to post valuable content to your followers that have invested in you for a reason. So you can share whatever insights, knowledge or information you want to share with them.
Whatever is your talent, or your value-add, as long as the world is willing to pay for what you offer, you can have a market cap, and create a business of your own. Even if you’re just a humorist, making jokes all day, people can buy your token to see your ‘premium jokes’ on their feeds. And you can monetize your talent by becoming like a public listed company. This is very powerful and should incentivize people to post valuable, quality content on this social network, rather than wasting their time with funny dances like on tiktok or others 🙂
Also, youtubers will be able to share their insights right away to their investor/subscribers, they don’t have to make 5min long videos for some insights that last only 10seconds. People want the quality, and your token price, and marketcap, will be reflective of that.
Q: Hi! What can users do with Solcial token? Do you plan to integrate solcial into existing metaverse or project plans to stay by itself?
Asks @esterlis
Solcial Admin: The Solcial token (SLCL) will be used as a governance token for voting on the DAO, for having discounts on trading fees, and to buy the token of anyone on Solcial you will need SLCL as the base currency.
Yes, we are working on partnerships with other crypto and metaverse projects but we can’t communicate on that yet.
Q: How a follower can earn with solcial? What incentives to active community and supporters?
Asks @Nitin1200
Solcial Admin: A follower can earn if the token of the influencer/blogger he invested in is going higher, if his/her audience is growing.
Q: Does the app act like Bittorrent, constantly downloading and uploading content to enable P2P communication?
Asks @darth_infernal
Solcial Admin: Correct, but we’ve optimised the parameters to not waste bandwidth yet offering a strong censorship resistance.
Q: I suppose there won’t be any ads or paid promotions. is that right?
Asks @darth_infernal
Solcial Admin: nope, no ads 😉 (unless the community decides to vote differently on the DAO later).
Q: And you can’t see other people’s content unless you have a certain amount of their token? and the threshold can be set by the profile itself i presume?
Asks @bigcuh9
Solcial Admin: Yes anyone decides for themselves. But all users have a Free Tier 1 so you can follow anyone for free (if they want to share free posts).
Q: Okay, but who will be in charge of what is allowed? will there be a DAO consisting of the solcial token holders who can vote on the community guidelines etc.?
Asks @bigcuh9
Solcial Admin: The community will be in charge. Yes, we have a DAO and a foundation, people will be able to vote on the future decisions and directions of the platform.
Q: If the mobile phones are to be used as P2P servers/clients won’t it require plenty of bandwidth and lots of memory, especially as the content grows into PentaBytes? Any incentives to run the P2P nodes to support the application?
Asks @darth_infernal
Solcial Admin: Good question, we’ve tweaked the parameters so the load is evenly distributed among nodes for data propagation. Users’ phones and computers will be able to receive the content but the connection density and duplicate messages are not too high, so we are achieving good results with low bandwidth, and good decentralization.
About Solcial
Solcial is a decentralised social network that gives users the power of web3 by allowing people to interact with each other without fearing censorship, and allowing content creators to be rewarded fairly at market value.
Get in Touch
Telegram: https://t.me/solcial
Discord: https://discord.gg/solcial
Twitter: https://twitter.com/solcialofficial
Blog: http://blog.solcial.io/
Website: https://solcial.io
Email: [email protected]
Linktree: https://linktr.ee/solcial
