TL;DR: Subsocial is consolidating siloed discussions in the ecosystem, as well as enabling users to chat on-chain about any entity or resource, such as proposals, markets, and accounts. This communication layer will be open and accessible by anyone and any application, improving information flow and availability in the ecosystem.

Currently, communication in the Polkadot ecosystem is not only largely stuck in Web2, but it is siloed and segregated. Governance discussions take place off-chain, projects have to rely on Discord and Telegram to interact with their communities, and suboptimal solutions are implemented for connecting these Web2 accounts to users’ Web3 accounts. Furthermore, by forcing communities to live off-chain, user engagement with dapps is lowered.

At Subsocial, we spent three months researching the needs of the ecosystem, and began implementing the foundation for Polkadot’s Open Communication Layer. We realized that, although Web3 communities, and their communications, should be moved on-chain, there was too much friction with actually using a blockchain for this.

To address this problem, we created Grill.chat as a proof of concept for OpenComm, showing how easy it is for users to start communicating on-chain. The onboarding process is even faster than Web2 apps that we are used to, as you don’t even have to create an account; you just send your first message and an account is automatically generated for you.

With OpenComm, all governance discussions will take place on-chain, and the content and messages will be freely accessible by anyone. This means we could have ten different governance platforms, all connected to the OpenComm social layer, allowing anyone to access the full breadth of Polkadot’s governance discussions, despite their UI/UX preference.

This can be expanded to any project in the ecosystem, and does not apply to just governance discussions. NFT fans could discuss a specific NFT on Singular or Kodadot, accessing a single unified chat from different applications. Sports betters could anonymously discuss Zeitgeist prediction markets on-chain, directly from the PM webpage. Multiple projects are currently working to integrate OpenComm.

Please read the full proposal for all of the relevant details including full context, milestone breakdown, budget, etc.

This topic was previously posted on the Polkadot Forum for some preliminary discussion, but please let us know what you think here.