_{Because Twitter became of Elongated Muskrat.}

#boredom #half-serious #definitely-could-have-spent-time-writing-this-on-something-else

Objective

Deliver a good social network.
Since I like to make games, I’m going to approach it from that angle.

Background

I like making things* and want to bundle creating, publishing, and consuming them together into a social media experience.
_{* games}

Overview

Many existing sites geared towards the creative sector have social media elements that are put on the backseat while prioritizing one business purpose or another. (E.g. Steam for marketing games, Casting Call Club for being a talent hub). Let’s flip it and have a centralized social network with ancillary business features. After all, to have a business, you first need a village, etc.

Imagine you’re an artist who wants to:

• Build clout
• Give feedback
• Interact with others who may share your interest
• Easily access community-sourced media that you’re actually interested in
• Easily access commission opportunities

You log into Kuranto’s Whimsical AF Creator’s Social Network “KWAFCSN” and check your feed. You see posts and replies made by individuals you follow. Pretty standard for a social media site.

But this one is different; you can follow Communities, in fact, you’ve followed several – one that is a Guild focused on a particular art form you’re interested in, the other is a Fan Club for a franchise you like. Only the thread with the most interactions (within a specific timeframe) from each of these communities made it to your feed, though you could always access the community’s Community Feed itself to catch up with the latest posts.

After feeling satiated with the art, exciting fan club news, and daily musings of various folk, you decide to take on a commission. Actually, you remember scrolling past a post on your feed announcing an open commission request for an ongoing Project you recently followed. You visit that project’s Project Profile to see what the deal is, and browse the commission requests section. You’ve interacted a bit with the Project’s Producer via thread replies and have taken interest in the project. You briefly flirt with the idea of joining the project’s team and becoming a Contributor to the Project (with permission of course). You would be given the privilege to make posts on the Project’s behalf, and even share the Community Manager role with the rest of the team once (and if) the Producer decides to transition the Project to a Fan Club community upon release, given enough popularity.
Anyway, commissions. The entry displayed in the Project’s commission requests section would have appeared in many other artists’ feeds, given that this is a popular Project. You apply to take on this request and hope that the portfolio links and commission price sheet you include in your application suits their fancy. Plus, it definitely wouldn’t hurt to have the Project Profile’s credits section include a link to your Personal Profile. If things don’t go as planned, you could always browse open commission requests (from just about any Project / individual). You could also browse your Guild’s feed for requests, since Projects and individuals have the option to forward requests to Guilds to be broadcasted within the Guild for maximum visibility.

Related work

Let’s start by explaining what KWAFCSN is not: it’s not a Twitter replacement. It’s also not a Steam replacement, Discord replacement etc. Rather, it tries to fulfill its own niche using social networking and business facilitation elements taken from other sites. Here are some examples of elements we are borrowing:

• Microblogging is the dominant form of social media, as shown by Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram.
• A Distribution platform like Steam and Itch.io facilitates business transactions, which we aren’t exactly doing here, but the concept of Steam and Itch.io profiles can be transplanted here where there is potentially more engagement in a community-oriented platform.
• A community of creators is a talent portal in its own right, which is the niche of Casting Call Club in the form of voice work. The commissioning process would be streamlined to pair commissioners with commissionees as intuitively as possible, across all forms of artistic expression.

Reddit and Discord are two sites that support communities in their own unique way – one by the use of sub-forums and one being a giant glorified chatroom. Community boundaries are valuable for users in letting them categorize and maintain their interests.

Infrastructure

• Gaming Projects and Fan Clubs are to support a global scoreboard that can be displayed on the profile for games that have a high score system. Scores can be pushed via an API call from client endpoints.
• Account management needs to exist. Do something with OAuth with Google accounts.

Success criteria

• It launches.
• People use it.

Detailed design

WIP

Project information

• Person with an idea: @kurantoB
• Codebase: WIP

Measuring improvements

Line of user activity goes up

Caveats

Hacks, PII leaks, harassment, objectionable content.

Scalability

Use a containerized architecture.

Redundancy and reliability

To be taken care of by a cloud provider.

Dependency considerations

WIP

Data integrity

WIP

SLA (service level agreements) requirements

WIP

Security considerations

• Site content needs to be regularly backed up in case a malicious actor deletes stuff.
• Man-in-the-middle attacks during game highscore API calls.

Privacy considerations

WIP

Ethics

A TOS that makes sense.

@ me here.