⛩️Introduction

Solarplex is scalable sufficiently decentralized protocol for building online communities.

What is a protocol and why build one?

Internet protocols are the backbone of our digital world, providing a set of rules for formatting and processing data across various use cases. Governed by the international consortium known as the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), these protocols are openly specified and accessible for anyone to implement. This open nature promotes innovation and interoperability across the internet. However, the traditional model for protocol development can be slow to adapt to rapidly evolving user needs, making it challenging to achieve quick, iterative progress.

In response to this challenge, social media protocols have emerged, primarily developed by centralized companies. The need for specific primitives and monetization models that were not available in existing internet protocols led to the creation of centralized social media platforms. These platforms have successfully addressed the evolving user needs, but their centralized nature often results in concerns around privacy, censorship, and control over user data.

By developing a new, decentralized social media protocol, we can harness the benefits of open specifications and interoperability while addressing the limitations of centralized platforms, ultimately empowering users and fostering innovation.

Building on this understanding, a "sufficiently decentralized" protocol should encompass a set of guarantees that empower users and prioritize their needs. While definitions may vary, we believe that the following core principles are essential for a decentralized protocol:

• Identity: Ensuring that users can prove their identity in a verifiable way, allowing them to establish trust and credibility within the online community.

• Integrity: Guaranteeing that user-generated content is linked to their identity, while being both censorship-resistant and open to moderation, striking a balance between freedom of expression and maintaining a safe, respectful environment.

• Influence: Enabling users to own the list of people who engage with them, and reach their audience without relying on centralized entities or algorithms that may be biased or manipulative.

By incorporating these guarantees into the design of Solarplex, our goal is to create a more user-centric and equitable online space, free from the constraints and potential abuses of centralized platforms.

Elements of a decentralized community protocol

A decentralized community protocol requires several key architectural features to ensure its functionality, performance, and security. In the next section, we'll talk about the architecture of Solarplex and the design decisions taken to solve for these requirements.

• Distributed message passing system - A mechanism to maintain a transparent, tamper resistant and distributed record of all the interactions happening across the network.

• Consensus mechanism - An efficient and secure consensus mechanism is needed to validate and confirm transactions or updates, ensuring the integrity of the network and establishing a reliable order of events.

• Scalability: The architecture should be designed to handle a large number of simultaneous users and transactions, ensuring high throughput and performance.

• Low latency: A decentralized community protocol should provide real-time updates and content delivery to its users, requiring an architecture that minimizes latency in processing and propagating transactions.

• Privacy and security: The protocol should prioritize privacy and security, employing strong encryption and authentication methods to protect user data and prevent unauthorized access or manipulation.

• App views - support for applications on top of this decentralized protocol that can provide user value.

• Incentive mechanisms: To encourage user participation and maintain network security, the architecture should include incentive mechanisms for users who contribute resources or perform actions that benefit the network.

• Governance and upgradability: A decentralized community protocol should have a well-defined governance system in place, allowing the community to make decisions on updates, improvements, and changes to the protocol.

• Decentralized storage: The protocol should provide a distributed storage solution for hosting user-generated content, ensuring that data remains accessible and resilient even if individual nodes fail or become unavailable.

Landscape

The following two decentralized protocols are extremely popular, and while they maintain many similarities to Solarplex, our goal is to build a protocol specifically for "Reddit" style communities vs a "Twitter" style broadcast community. As a result, some of our design decisions will be different.

• Farcaster

• AT Protocol