Polkassembly - Implement a Kusama Forum MVP (Content Pallet v2) #2681

Full proposal: https://acuity.network/proposals/2/

A decentralised, common good, on-chain publishing platform for coordinating an independent Kusama, built on existing and emerging community developed tools and technologies.

Track: MediumSpender
Base amount:       768 KSM
Volatility buffer: 128 KSM
Total amount:      896 KSM (~13,500 USD)

Proponent: ethernomad

Deliverable/s: Kusama Forum MVP

MVP beta testers: Daniel Olano (Virto Network), Treasury Guardians, Pablo Dorado (Virto Network / Polkadot Fellowship), Flipchan (Kusama Shield)

Project Category/Type: Ecosystem collaboration

Previous funding: Jonathan has been previously funded by two (1, 2) Web3 Foundation grants and a Kusama Treasury referendum.

Problem Statement

“Kusama currently lacks a role since its discontinuation as the test/alpha chain and it requires a better and renewed approach to consider funding.”

-- Saxemberg, Comment on Content Pallet proposal.

In the early days of Kusama there was a dedicated forum, however this was discontinued in favour of a Polkadot-centric communications strategy.

As a direct result the Polkadot Forum was launched on Discourse with Kusama related posts using a specific tag, but no specific environment to cultivate its unique culture.

With the community approving the W3F’s new vision for an independent Kusama alongside a commitment of 10m DOT for kickstarting radical innovation via bounties for ZK, proof of personhood and art, the community needs a dedicated space for discussion, coordination and onboarding talent.

In the spirit of Kusama, we believe that we should use this opportunity to dog food the network’s tools and technology and drive the burning of KSM by developing a fully on-chain forum and publishing platform that can release the potential of existing and incoming contributors.

This proposal follows on from the recently rejected pallet_content referendum taking into account public and private feedback.

The forum focus has been developed in collaboration with a number of trusted Kusama agents who have each committed to beta test by publishing their own material proving out initial demand.

The project builds on 10 years of work done by Jonathan (ethernomad).

Technology Background

So far Web3 has failed to replace any major Web 2.0 platforms. They continue to become more consolidated, enshittified and homogeneous.

For anyone deeply involved in blockchain technology it is obvious that YouTube, X, Reddit, Wikipedia, GitHub, web forums (like Discourse), RSS and software package managers could all be out-innovated by on-chain alternatives.

They would have the following important properties:

Semantic data as a first class citizen

The Semantic Web has largely failed in its mission. The dream of composability has not happened. Jonathan would argue that this is because the semantic data is not a first class citizen on the web. The data is locked away in private databases, only accessible visually via apps, added as an afterthought to HTML, or hidden behind a paywall.

On-chain content publication brings the opportunity for the data itself to be the first class citizen. Instead of every website being a CMS on the periphery of the system, the Web could be replaced by an on-chain CMS.

Unstoppable APIs

Part of the venture capital scam is to start with an open API to build a strong community and then switch it off or put it behind a paywall once the platform is successful. Reddit and X both did this in 2023. You used to be able to choose your app for these platforms. Now you can only use the official apps.

With on-chain publication no one has the authority to disable the API. Anyone can sync the chain from scratch, query the state and index the events. This creates a market incentive to provide easy access to the chain and an index of it.

Permissionless innovation

Every developer is extremely frustrated by the major platforms because they can't improve them. The YouTube dislike count was taken away from us. With on-chain platforms this wouldn't be possible. Developers could innovate both on-chain and off-chain without restriction.

Timestamping

In the age of AI where anything can be faked it is becoming increasingly important to know exactly when something was published. On-chain content is irrevocably timestamped. It is proof of who said what when.

Extremely reliable

Centralized Web 2.0 platforms routinely go offline, both by accident and by design. With on-chain publishing this problem can largely be eliminated.

Choose your own algorithm

These days, everyone is criticising The Algorithm. But what if developers could develop many algorithms and end-users could choose which one they want to use?

Permanent Content

A major problem with the Web is that content is being lost. It is being left up to the Internet Archive to ensure that content remains available, but this is not always successful. Content durability should be built in to the design of the Web, not added as an afterthought. With on-chain publishing and IPFS, anyone can help keep content alive in its original location.

DAOs

Platforms can make decisions through on-chain governance. For example, if every open source software project had its own token, token holders could vote on many issues including when to make a new release.

Content moderation could happen via an on-chain court enforcing the rules in a consistent manner.

Original Implementation

Jonathan previously developed an on-chain publishing platform called MIX. It was built on an EVM chain with all of the on-chain logic implemented as Solidity smart contracts. These have been archived into a monorepo. Content was published to IPFS and the content hashes stored in contract state.

Demonstration videos from the original platform:

Using a solo EVM chain for this purpose was shown to have a number of issues:

low security
low scalability - EVM, IPFS hashes stored in state
slow confirmation ~14 sec
centralized exchanges

Kusama solves all these issues:

relay chain for shared security
parachains, native pallets, agile coretime, elastic scaling, JAM, and emiting IPFS hashes as events provides massive scalability gains
fast confirmation, finality
Hydration DEX

A key component of this proposal is to port functionality from the MIX smart contracts into a Substrate pallet called pallet_content. This pallet would be available for any Substrate chain to add to their runtime.

Content Encoding

It is necessary to have a standardized data format for content stored via the pallet_content. The original MIX implementation used a system of content mixins encoded using Protobuf and compressed with Brotli (2015 blog post explaining why Brotli was chosen).

pallet_content will use a similar system, except it will be compressed with Zstandard as this has now become the de facto industry standard for compressing small files.

Examples of mixins are title, body, date, image, video.

Content Moderation

For this MVP content moderation will take 2 forms:

Trusted Accounts

Each user maintains on-chain a list of other users they trust. Users will only see content from users they trust directly and users who are trusted by someone they trust.

This creates a viral web of trust as users start to trust users they have been exposed to by users they already trust.

The original MIX smart contract has already been ported to the Trusted Accounts pallet. A video of Trusted Accounts in action can be seen here.

Indexer Censorship

The most egregious forms of inappropriate content can be removed directly from the indexer. Of course, power users can always run their own indexer.

Deliverables

1. Content Pallet - $1000

The primary deliverable is the porting of the AcuityItemStoreIpfsSha256 Solidity contract to a Substrate pallet called pallet_content.

pallet_content will have the the following features:

Configurable content storage

Each instance of the pallet_content can be configured to store content in a different way. For example, one instance could emit the content directly in the event as a string. Another instance could emit content as an IPFS hash.

Global item_id

When a content item is created a nonce needs to be supplied. The item_id is created by hashing a chain identifier, a pallet instance identifier, address of the content owner, and the nonce. For example, the nonce could be created with BIP32. This means the item_id can be known before the item is created. The pallet ensures that an item_id cannot be reused.

The item_id should generally not be visible to the user.

Configurable items

Content items can have configuration flags set at creation time and optionally changed later by the owner of the item.

Items can be:

revisionable - new revisions can be published
retractable - the item can be marked as retracted. Of course, revision history emitted as events cannot be removed.
parent - items created later can be children of this item
parent only owner - only the owner of the parent item can create a child item

Revisionable

Each revision of a content item is emitted as an event. A backend or standardised indexer can collate the content revisions for each item.

Composable

A problem with the existing "remark" functionality in Polkadot SDK is that it relies on only storing the content in the source extrinsic. This reduces composability because the indexer has to be maintained to be able to find the extrinsic if it has been generated in a new way, for example as part of another extrinsic.

By emitting an IPFS hash as an event, content can be indexed regardless of how it is generated.

Hierarchical

When an item is created it can be attached to parent items if it has permission. This functionality will be ported from the AcuityItemDag contracts.

This can be used for:

commenting on another content item
publishing content in feeds
publishing in forum topics

Only the list of parents is stored on chain. Obtaining a list of children must be done by event indexing. This is because an item can be spammed with children and the indexer can use other criteria to filter the results.

Unit tests

pallet_content will have complete test coverage.

2. Kusama Forum Parachain - $3000

A Kusama Forum parachain will be significantly more scalable than deploying to an existing chain as smart contracts. It will be launched with the following features:

No native token - use KSM to pay for transactions
Fees generated from forum functions burned via the upcoming Dark Hole pallet or equivalent
On Demand Kusama Parachain potentially structured as Kreivo satellite chain to lower infrastructure overhead
Pallet Content for Kusama Forum publishing
Trusted Accounts Pallet to build a trust network

3. Indexer - $1000

Because the IPFS hashes are output as events instead of state to save transaction costs, it is necessary for the Kusama Forum dapp to have access to an instance of Acuity Index (previously funded by 2 W3F grants and a Kusama Treasury Referendum). This will be hosted alongside the default RPC endpoint for Kusama Forum.

The indexer will also "pin" IPFS content to ensure it stays available. This was previously implemented by mix-pin.

Much like a full node, power users can always run their own indexer, but most people will not do this.

4. Kusama Forum Dapp - $3000

The Dapp will be the decentralized frontend MVP for accessing the platform.

Built on Svelte frontend JS framework.
Chain communication provided by Polkadot-API
Sign in will be handled by Virto Connect including zkLogin for privacy-preserving authentication
Profile pictures with avatars
Each user maintaining a public list of "trusted accounts"
Topic based posting
Image posting
Commenting on posts and comments
Editing content with new revisions
Emoji reactions

5. Hosting - $2000

1 year of hosting for:

full node and endpoint
event indexer
IPFS pinning
domain name

Future Deliverables

The proposal is just the starting point. Once the MVP is live it is inevitable that the community will be very vocal about their ideas of how things should proceed. There are endless ways the platform can be improved.

For example, a designer can examine the MVP and create a better user interface.

A security audit can be funded by a later referendum.

Benefit to Kusama Ecosystem

How will Kusama Forum benefit Kusama?

Web 2.0 is ripe to be replaced by Web3 and Kusama has the best technology and dynamism to built it.

Kusama Forum will not only provide a decentralized and extensible place for the community to communicate, it will demonstrate the power of replacing Web 2.0 with a shared on-chain CMS.

Because transaction fees will be paid with KSM, this will help drive up the value.