Hey everyone, Junto here! We’re creating a new breed of social media in the spirit of authenticity. Our goal is to move beyond the extractive paradigm of social media through more conscious design, distributed technology, and a nonprofit approach.
We launched a successful Kickstarter campaign back in January, raising $106,949 in 30 days.
We’re now preparing to release our alpha in the coming weeks and are excited to move things forward with you!
Feel free to ask us any questions below and looking forward to chatting!
what would be your business model to monetize Junto?
B4 looking at holochain, what other platform did you ever consider? And ultimately, why did you choose holochain?
Will junto have their own currency? Or not neccessary?
what would be your approach to data validation/integrity for junto? Will you use any available validation package from HDK? Or will you make some changes/do a new one?
Will junto able to have video (shared/distributed) uploads/downloads - like a youtube within a social network?
The greatest challenge to me is crafting an atmosphere that fosters the right balance between engaging and non-addictive. We want to redesign the fundamentals of social media in ways that can inspire more authenticity and deeper interconnectivity, and we have to be extremely careful we don’t fall back into patterns that prioritize growth over wellbeing.
Our initial alpha release will consist of two phases that will run parallel to one another. The first is a production-ready release of Junto built on a centralized infrastructure (AWS). The second is a test-network web application that members can run as a full holochain node or interface with the Holo test net. Our test-network will leverage as much of Holochain and Holo as it can and the code for both our production ready release and test network will be open source.
We’ll use our centralized API until Holo is in beta. Once we feel Holo is production ready, we will transition everyone on Junto to the decentralized web.
I tend to believe things unfold the way they’re supposed to. However, if we could start over I would prioritize getting our centralized alpha out there sooner. There’s quite a bit of product development and intentional community building we can do as Holochain and Holo matures and I’m excited for when all of these pieces come into unison.
We just began internal testing for our alpha that will be centralized. We’re also spinning up a test-network alpha that will run on Holochain, and expect to have a webapp up and running by end of Q4 2019/early Q1 2020.
Business model is currently a “premium” based model whereby users can pay a given amount for a set of premium features on Junto. This is something we would like to work with the community on in order to determine what is needed by users and what people would be happy to pay for.
We looked at a few other options for decentralised/distributed hosting mainly: Ethereum. When looking at the state of ethereum and other projects in the space one year ago; it was clear that the price of hosting as well as scaling capabilities of these projects would not make sense for us. Especially given Junto will need to store large amounts of data. Holochain was the clear solution with much greater scaling capabilities as well as a more aligned vision.
Right now having our own currency does not seem necassary. However in the future it would be great to be able to facilitate low-cost borderless transactions. This could be especially useful in the supporting of content creators.
Right now it looks like the validation methods provided in the HDK will do all we need as far as core application logic. The only place where a custom solution may need to be made will be in regards to the removing of illicit or illegal material on Junto. The solution for this is currently unclear. It may be regulated using some validation logic built into the application or more probably moderate by the community and its elected moderators. The election process as well as the moderation process could be governed by some form of social “current-see”.
Absolutely. One of our goals at Junto is to support all forms of digital expression. As holochains capabilities and application base grows we will see a rise in the variety of media that can be supported as well as the size of media supported. We intend to leverage these capabilities as fully as possible.
Great question! For the initial release on holochain we will only support “small”, simple data. As we see that our application is stable and working as intended; we will start allocating more resources towards building out the necessary pieces in order for larger data storage to occur. There is currently something already in the works for sharded data by the holochain community, however it is in a very early stage of development. This is most likely where we would start with the hope to work more closely with other holochain community members as well as holochain themselves.
