The Future of Social Media with Andra Georgescu (Distrikt)

and now it's time for our talk with andra so we know andre very well we have had her on board i think the last two editions of our conference right last two yeah [Music] so i think what they are building what they have built and what they are on their way to build andra and the rest of the team i think it's amazing it's a decentralized social media platform so so think of like linkedin or twitter but decentralized built on dfinity blockchain um and also i think what's very interesting to see it's like uh they're actually building stuff they already have i don't know more than 10 000 users well i think andrew will explain that and they haven't raised any money right no no token sale no vc funding um so i think it's very very interesting to see that because we don't really see this i think in blockchain crypto there is usually a lot of money beforehand and then hopefully something is built and sometimes nothing is built but uh and very glad very glad to have you here um first of all i think it'd be nice for all of us to understand a bit better what is district what have you built what what what is your objective and then i have a lot of questions for you and i think the audience also have a lot of questions yeah sure sounds good it's very nice to see everybody i'm happy you guys uh could join like victoria said my name is andre georgeso i'm the co-founder of district district is a social media application with a professional twist we are focused to serve mostly young professional professionals that are passionate about new technology it is 100 decentralized it started off as being decentralized from an infrastructure level and um it's a fairly young project um we started off last february with an idea in july of 2021 we launched the web application so we moved pretty fast with the mvp in september we launched the android app and in january this year we launched the ios application we now have around 90 000 accounts that were created on district we do have a bit of a bot problem like all social media network networks both centralized and decentralized which is why i said that we have 90 000 accounts and not 90 000 users because i don't think that would be very honest to me we know the number of accounts we approximate the number of users to be around 40 or 50 percent of that we won't be more optimistic even so it's it's uh it's a great number for such a young platform you guys can hear me okay is the sound right yeah perfect perfect okay cool um district is supported and maintained by the open internet foundation which is a swiss not-for-profit foundation with the mission to promote the expansion of an open internet through the development of digital products and services that empower the user um like victoria said we have not conducted any type of token sales or raised in bc money we are lucky enough to have the possibility to be self-funded which is something that many projects don't have the privilege to to be in the position to have founders that are capable of doing this effort but we did want to make district a web 3 experiment in its entirety this is why we decided to go all in and not make just the platform like as independent and autonomous as possible but also the project itself even from you know a tokenization perspective so this idea of creating a decentralized social media network is not necessarily a new one various people have experimented with this concept of a decentralized network with very varying degrees of decentralization but i think what is new and innovative about district is its execution and the technology it relies upon because this trig unlike most of the web 3 projects out there lives 100 on blockchain so because of the unique capabilities of the internet computer which is the underlying network on which uh district was built the platform relies on or no centralized infrastructure like aws for instance so the entirety of the platform including the back end the front end all the assets everything uploaded by by the users is stored directly on the internet computer this offers district a lot of autonomy and it frees it of platform risk so for instance during the last aws outage district works just fine with no issues whatsoever right usually with web3 projects you see indeed a decentralized backend but a very very centralized front end and this is um you know a vulnerability let's say so for us yeah it made more more sense to develop this uh social network on top of this decentralized infrastructure than it did to build on top of a centralized one even though it comes with its own challenges but um i mean if you want to have a network that in itself is as uh offers its users in its turn through freedom of speech through privacy and and true autonomy then you need to make sure that these values are like taking into account from day one and you build the platform around it around them it's pretty hard to backtrack once the platform gains momentum it's not impossible but imagine if facebook wanted to go full web 3 it would be i mean it would be the end of facebook basically so in terms of why we thought the project was needed i mean i think you're here and that means that it's also pretty clear to you that social media networks have grown big enough and powerful enough that we can't easily brush aside the issues that they're faced with because we're faced with them right i'm on district you're on district yeah that's so cool hi that was great actually that was a a party vibe that just came in through the back door so yeah it's like some of you are already on district so i guess the value proposition really appealed to you because um it's still early i understand it for most people like privacy and this type of data autonomy and everything that we want to deliver might not be as obviously a need as for our early adopters but i strongly believe that we're getting to a point where the shift is um unavoidable unfortunately and i say unfortunately because that reflects on how serious the situation is with our digital identity and footprint right now in in web 2. i mean we're talking about cambridge analytica countless privacy issues the platforming not only of users but of platforms themselves censorship and and we can't really ignore these issues forever right and shutting them down is not necessarily a good option because these platforms are needed this is why they're so popular they create environments that nurture this type of positive relationship and means of communication expression collaboration everything that we find so valuable as a society so we need them we just don't need to pay for them with our data and submit to censorship or face the platforming so we need to build better alternatives which is what we're trying uh to do bypassing big tech monopoly relying on the internet computer which provides us with much more of a uh of a comfort from this point of view um and and offering people you know uh an alternative that treats them as people not not as kpis um yeah so in terms of platform risk this is like one of the things i would like to underline because if you're here you're probably interested in developing your own projects and we found like this freedom from proprietary risk and from platform risk we found it to be very very valuable in in what we've built so far and in terms of privacy if this is something that you're interested for yourself or maybe to offer to your own users district is also a good example of a web 3 project that takes this really seriously because as some of you know because your users the district doesn't require any personal data from you when you sign up so no usernames no password uh its login is like a zero knowledge uh identity service that allows you to uh login via biometrics or security key um it the information never leaves your device and it's inherently uh more secure and more privacy preserving than anything else out there right now in terms of accessing that but so it's the one question so people what what do they use like their finger fingerprint or whatever like the face or exactly you use the biometrics from your device which means that basically the way you uh open up your phone is the same way that you can log into district all you need is to create an account it will give you a number which is the equivalent of a username in the future it will be a username but early days it's not even a year old so it will give you a number we call it an anchor number and you don't have any password you just have the biometric data that your device already uses to unlock the access to the district platform actually victoria i didn't tell you but i created an account on the street it's about time i use my finger oh we didn't you didn't even show me okay nice well i i still haven't i haven't i still haven't got down the the the app so my bad but uh but actually talking about the like users now now you have a new user or account you said you had 90 000 accounts but how many do you think are like users i mean of those nine i mean it's five fifty percent of them are users i'm a happy camper uh if we have like forty five percent uh 45 000 real users i'm i'm happy i don't think we do i think the real numbers might be a bit smaller like let's say 30 35 000. um it's very hard for us to determine because we don't collect any data yeah but but but but how how did you get how did you get the real the real use of where did they come from i mean how how did they well we started within the internet computer ecosystem we are one of the first projects and apps that launched on the internet computer so obviously our first adopters were within that community people that tried were eager to experiment uh with this technology and see stuff built on it and they provided us with a lot of valuable feedback and we're still not ready to break out of the internet computer community we are working on improving our onboarding experience if you go through it now it's not bad i mean you it's a it's a good onboarding experience for an mvp but we're at the point where we need to evolve past the stage of an mvp type of product and into more mature and sophisticated experience and so the onboarding in my opinion is key to us being more appealing to other crypto communities and then after that being uh even more appealing to the tech community at large so going for you know the web to tech enthusiasts how was how was the onboarding process daniel was it was it a bit complex as andre was saying or not too bad well as i as i didn't know anything so i didn't know i was thinking so should i use my finger somewhere or like my camera or something like that so i didn't know what to expect so i was really yeah uh like i knew nothing i mean it took me a little while to understand it but i made it so so how how long did it take you this is like very good feedback i'm using yeah yeah that's a focus group right now that's actually focus group i mean i was also trying to calm down my baby so now i don't know maybe two minutes something like that one minute and a half i don't know okay that's basically because i also spent some time reading the you know stuff because i was curious like i wanted to see like it's my first web free social media platform right so i wanted to learn like also how to look at the legal stuff right i had to sign or something like that so yeah we have the terms and conditions yeah where we also state that we don't collect data from you and stuff like that but we also have like uh if you get stuck a bit with the internet identity which is this uh zero knowledge entity service that the street uses we have an infographic that pops up when you click on the question mark yeah yeah correct yeah yeah actually yeah so i had to write somewhere encore id something like that and i was like but what is that so i had to yeah to read the message that pops up and yeah so i had a look at the icp website also in the meantime so yeah yeah i was learning there are some cool cool apps being built on the on the internet computer right now um though i mean district is one of the first and i think one of the most promising of course but it's uh it's mind-blowing to me that the entirety of the platform is unchained and that it works so well given the fact that it needs to like the blockchain needs to uh reach consensus about so many things just for you like to interact with other people directly on chain this is the true like this is what get us really really excited to tackle the challenges because it's not as easy as putting together three libraries and and and some tools some web tool tooling that works really well you need to build it from scratch so everything that you need and all the challenges that you have you need to like go back to basic basics and and uh our devs are trying are getting this type of old-school feel where it's it's neat it's clean but it takes you back to building from scratch so it's interesting but i guess i guess and it's probably i mean you're building something that's so so new i mean even though everybody knows what a social media platform is but like in a decentralized way that i guess it's normal that the login process now in the beginning is gonna be complex um i mean like i remember when i logged into the internet when i was young i don't know 10 years old yeah it's not that bad no but i mean i can make it i know i'm exaggerating a bit but i guess always i mean the the beginning of all new eras i mean it's not going to be like extremely smooth right and then also you're building as you said everything is hundred percent unchained right everything everything everything everything i mean i think it's good i think for the ndp stage the onboarding is it's really good i have no complaints i just i think we're at the stage where it's time to tackle new audiences that are just not as familiar with this type of technology as our current users are that's the only thing because two minutes for somebody that didn't know anything about it that's not very complicated you just get a number instead of a username which might be a bit weird for people that are not as techie or stuff um and uh but then i mean i want to ask you i want to ask you something completely different so so people on the platform what do they talk about i mean like when you look well they talk we have a deaf community they talk a lot about what's being built on my uh on on like in our community so they talk a lot about that we also have uh our internet computer community that's talking a lot um about you know tokens and and trading we have trading community community like so like twitter like trading yeah it's it's a bit people are calling it the web street twitter at the moment we were aiming for a more professional um uh positioning yeah more likely more likely more like a decentralized linkedin but people are more excited to use it as twitter okay but can people also upload a photo like yes directly on chain you can upload photos uh they are like they go directly on the blockchain yeah yeah very cool well actually i saw one of our alumni's lumi carlos at some point raising a hand carlos do you want to ask your question i don't see your hand raised anymore are you there carlos oh yeah i think i see his question in the chat so he said yeah i think it's cool if somebody has a question we let people talk and a little 10 second introduction is great just to get a feeling of who's in the room right yeah that's all that's right okay he raised the he raised his hand again carlos yeah go ahead i we cannot hear you carlos or see you you have a nice photo in black and white you're blocked you're blocked oh somebody unblocked carlos [Music] oh god how can i block people how can i start video out i'm clicking on ask let's try with another one i can see cow is that i don't know yes that's correct yes can you hear me yes okay cool we cannot see you do you have a camera or if not please go ahead come on guys we need to go quick yeah we have so many so many raised hands okay maxi i can see who's ready i can jump in i'm ready hello oh yeah cool uh so uh my question basically is that you just mentioned about the the pictures um being stored on the blockchain so um is that itfs kind of a structure which you mentioned okay no um so the thing is i'm gonna have to shield the internet computer a bit because it's uh it's all-in-one so instead of having storage and computation separately you have both storage and computation in the same blockchain network with like infinite scalability because the network itself is built to adjust the subnet that your dap is on to the requirements that it has in terms of you know volume so uh go ahead sorry yeah yeah thanks for that uh yeah i mean i actually come from an ethereum background uh i'm um i'm a tech lead and also manage a team of developers basically on the ethereum uh basically we write smart contracts uh on solidity so yeah i mean is your blockchain on is the blockchain that your pro platform using on the ethereum network or you have your own blockchain so that was kind of my question oh no it's its own network um it's its own blockchain it's not based on ethereum it's actually integrating with ethereum soon but uh no it's it's completely different but you should check it out if you're interested in having everything on chain because ethereum is uh awesome like awesome in terms of decentralization and and everything that it provides but the the thing that i think that could really complement it is integrating with something like the internet computer to have everything on chain right and is there a white paper we could see any web presence uh oh yeah okay yeah yeah uh go to smartcontracts.org okay awesome all right thanks so much that was my question welcome thanks carlos i think now you're back right or not you tried you tried censoring me i'm outraged i want to ask questions i always ask questions yeah we need to zoom decentralized three yeah yeah so i i i was on the second court with the ets uh i was waiting for for this this conference and uh just one question uh how many projects are using the uh the identity module of the icp network do you have any idea because well let me count on my fingers the ones i do know that use them so it's district it's uh discover which is uh a sort of decentralized reddit uh we have openchat which is a decentralized whatsapp if you will or telegram we have entropot which is a decentralized nifty marketplace that uses this we have two vexes that use this um who am i missing i'm missing somebody that's already not bad at all but then yeah there's a lot question yeah one next question you were thinking of moving ahead of the mpv mvp stage and maybe opening up to users not in the um in the icp uh space in the dfinity blockchain um how are you gonna manage their identities they're gonna always have to go through that service no yeah i mean that service in itself is implemented in our platform so it's a it's an open source service that anybody can use it's not like uh you know a centralized third party that we are reliant on so um the way they're going to do it is through their same way they access metamask basically okay same thing so it doesn't really matter if you're active in the rest of the the ecosystem no you don't need tokens oh this is something that i should have mentioned in the beginning but i think i got so used to the way the computer works that i it totally flow out of my mind because it has a reverse gas model which means that the user doesn't need to pay or own or even be aware that tokens exist right they can just use the platform and um the gas the equivalent of gas is paid by the developers the same way as in web3 the maintenance you know the platform everything is paid by the owners of the platform good thank you very much welcome very nice thank you carlos yes as he said he was part of our second cohort and european sexual so oh i see a lot of questions i don't know who um maxi i think i managed to say maxi before but please go ahead yes yes thank you do you have a camera i'd like to see faces for them i mean if you i mean maybe people are in their pjs yeah yeah that's true like that yeah make it around in the living room yeah okay sorry go ahead okay so my question here will be most for like um for a beginner right not like uh people who knows about coding or even like um yeah in that knowledge of blockchain so my question will be here how do as a user how can i be sure that my biometrics are not being stored anyway because we we were talking with carlos here on the chat and he told me like well as long as you have your phone it's okay that information will be stored anyway um but yeah because the way it works it's not software dependent so it's not up to the software that uses your biometric it's up to the hardware so the way your phone is uh built the information never leaves it the chip that handles the biometrics you know so it is something is this um is this something that can be used on a notebook for example or only on the phone you can use it uh if you have a macbook that has fingerprint access for instance you can use it without a problem you can use it on your phone if you have a security key you can basically use it on any device because that replaces the need for a biometric and it's actually more secure in some ways because i've seen phones unlocked with somebody else's face but with the security key it's your finger on the button or it isn't right and you can also use a ledger i think i think so yeah not sure why why did you choose um for biometrics and not like a wallet a wallet publicly or something like that well i mean it seems more i mean you're like a little bit more anonymous make sense can you say that again with a public connecting with only wallet um maybe you are like a little bit a little bit more anonymous um oh yeah i don't think so you do i i don't i really don't no i think this is the most anonymous way to access district that is available for us out there right now a wallet uh who like what type of wallet are we talking about but mostly like district is a social media network it's not a dex uh your need for a wallet it's very limited almost none right now and the the way the internet identity works in terms of anonymity i think you should log in to your wallet via the internet identity so that would make your wallet more secure than having um you know seed like having the phrase and everything okay okay okay thank you thank you so much maxi so you you're dialing in from uruguay smiling and you're dialing in it sounds like the 19th nice very nice i was going to ask where he was from because i could tell the accent was kind of similar to mine so yeah we're live in uruguay and we're here as well he's from argentina no i'm from argentina oh nice nice very nice yeah we're here mate yeah nice let's let's get another accent in so uh counter well i am from saudi arabia and i'm living in tenerife canary island so [Laughter] okay and i have a question because of consensus and social media i guess there is a lot of transactional traffic on the network like every person put a tweet or a reply is this when the consensus is made and when the transaction is is made um is it possible to give us a rough description or high level description of the architecture of the platform um yes in terms of consensus it's uh pretty complicated also the the cryptography itself is uh the chain key cryptography is pretty complicated i am not i don't think i'm one of the big brains capable of explaining it in layman terms but i do have resources for that that i can share what i can give you like as a high brow like high level uh information presentation is that the internet computer works a lot like network of blockchains if you want to take each subnet as its own blockchain right but these are not independent sovereign blockchains they are just subnets with uh that have in them the nodes required to store and and offer com computing capabilities to the depth and the thing that's very cool about it is that it's flexible and adaptable it is governed via the nns which is uh its governing governance module and can easily be modified to fit the need of different subnets split the subnet merge subnets and so on um to meet the requirements of the dabs that are in the software that is built on top of it it's um okay sorry i was distracted by the chat it's it's basically are you familiar with uh let's say the cosmos ecosystem and no no um let's say our subnet has 13 replicas which are 13 not nodes and we are in the point in a point where we need more this is something that the entirety of the internet computer blockchain can accommodate and facilitate by adjusting the network so scalability is not necessarily the issue consensus is not the issue because they all rely on the same consensus mechanism they don't have you know validators the the roles within the internet computer network are separated from uh traditional proof-of-stake system blockchain in the sense that the storage um and like the technical part that a traditional validator would do is uh done by the data centers professional data centers that need to abide by strict requirements that are located all over the globe and you can see see them in an explorer for instance and then you have the governance which is separate from from that and it's it's it's done via the nns uh by the token holders that have staked and locked their tokens in the neuron so these two things are separated which i think makes the system even more robust so i can i i i'm not doing a very good job explaining this i never do like i am being asked this a lot and it never comes out as coherent as it is in my head so i can i think i should share more resources uh after this that will explain it a lot better yeah um i would appreciate that and also i will look at the white paper of the platform of this yesterday i can um not sure how victoria how can we share these resources with them yeah that's a good question i mean um again so i have like a big big list of them yeah yeah because we have uh we've gathered the big list so yeah it's the same list that we use to onboard new developers for instance right if somebody joins our team and we want to like maybe do the proper research i can share that with you guys yeah maybe you know if people want to receive this you can reach out you know you you already receive an invitation by email you can reply back and then we can send you things is that i mean if not also maybe in the chat box but i think since andrew you're answering questions it's a little bit difficult also to be looking out for different folders right so yeah okay let's let's send it out to people so yeah reach out to us okay we to send it to you victoria and then centralize their email addresses right fantastic yeah awesome let's go for another question so benoit is also one of our alumni he was also part of one of our previous cohorts benoit you wanna hello hello i have a question regarding the cost for the usage of the social network so since everything is stored in chain i think that every time that someone posts something then it does a cost to be part of it unchained and the other question is that i understand that the district app is related to the icp so the import the internet computer and also i heard that there will be maybe an app on ethereum so my question is if district is a portable hub that can work on ethereum and also icp and also you said that it does its own blockchain so i i don't know if it is just an app which is running on ict or ecv and on top of that that's its own version maybe to store the data of the the social network i i think i can answer part of it as far as i understand and is correct that district is a it's built 100 on dfinity blockchain right and that's why yeah going on a district on your decentralized social media yeah app is on chain on dfinity but that's what i know the district lives 100 on the internet computer uh but the internet computer is planning to integrate uh with ethereum so okay that would be on a blockchain level so the thing that you could do is have you know i'm guessing this will be most useful for d5 projects actually than for district itself um but of course we we are planning to have you know so high so social uh d5 components so maybe in the future that will be more interesting to us as well but regarding your first question um can you repeat that yeah so i'm how much would it cost to use uh the district okay yeah so it's um it's to be honest it's kind of ridiculously cheap we haven't done the math but i can tell you that after six months of uh being live so now we're approaching 12 months we're approaching our one year anniversary um but after six months we spent 100 dollars now of course this grows the sum you know the more you scale so probably now we're looking at i don't know double or triple that because we have doubled uh almost tripled our users and also the content that we store and um you know the the platform has been more resource intensive than it was six months ago but yeah for this is the only like hard sum i have right now because we haven't done the math in a long time but it's cheap it's cheap it relies on cycles it's uh basically in order to pay you take icp tokens you convert them into cycles which are stable they're not they're not non-fluctuating and you pay with cycles for all your needs okay so you said on average for six months to use the district hub it costs on average one hundred dollars yeah yeah we were very shocked like at the end of last year we did same as to see how much money like how much it cost us to keep districts up and running and it was very cheap i think now it should be a lot more but it's still nothing compared to aws just to be sure to the the run and redraw is it the the cost that you paid to maintain the platform or is it the cost that the user has to pay to use your network the user never pays anything um unless they want to they can also fuel the platform with tokens in order for it to have the resources required to operate but that's like a donation the reverse gas model means that the developer pays for storage and computation so we pay the the user doesn't even need to know that the platform is on a blockchain that it involves any type of cryptocurrencies or anything like that they can use it like they use facebook okay thanks there's there's there's a very interesting question in the chat i mean actually two weeks ago we met your co-founder aurel yeah he came to barcelona and we uh so we had a few drinks with him and we asked him directly so what's the business model how is this trick sustainable like i'm very curious what he answered no i mean i have the answer i have the answer too but maybe you want to explain it in another way or i don't know like should i share it yeah share it share what he said there's no there's no business model he said yeah of course there's no business model because uh we decided early on the district is not going to make it be a business and what that means because what's the purpose of a business right to generate revenue and wealth for its stakeholders well district is uh doesn't have any uh stakeholders shareholders it's maintained by a not-for-profit foundation the purpose behind it is to make it as self-sustainable as possible so our goal if we ever introduce any uh monetization tools or implement anything regarding the monetization of the platform would be to make it self-sustainable this is i mean it's part of the reason why we conducted no token sales i mean we want to tokenize the platform the service itself we just didn't want to do any private token sales and and conduct anything that would benefit us it would benefit the vcs but it would exclude the user so this is in the sense of having a true web 3 experiment again i'm not saying that we're holier than the pope and this is how you guys should do it no this is like truly an experiment we might have you know a great success or an epic fail but uh we think it's totally worth the shot the funds and our time but no i think i think you know i think exactly rl's answer was like there is no business model um but i think yeah so as you said like maybe something you should do it at some point is find a way to monetize something to kind of like make the network sustainable because now you said okay of course hundred dollars or whatever you spent last year yeah i think the community the community can do that themselves we've been thinking about this a lot i think if we give them the the power to do so they are going to monetize it for themselves because um district by the end of the year our plan is to have it um 100 user governed so that will bring like next level the level and degree of decentralization and autonomy that district will have by the end of this year i think is unprecedented because it will be decentralized on an infrastructure level back in front and everything and it will be user-governed so the same way as the internet computer is being governed through the nns right now and you can make any type of changes that you want to the network itself the same way a district is going through to operate by the end of the year this means tokenization but this doesn't mean a token sale that you know the proceedings go to us it means a tokenization event in which any proceedings that happen go into a community pool that the users themselves control through this sms so that's going to be another interesting experiment having the users issue their own token control their own token and see how they deploy capital in order to grow the platform or maybe not i don't know it's a bit anxiety and you think but it's it's uh i mean you don't want to put your blood sweat and tears into building something great and then having you know a 51 attack and ending up in a worst case scenario i'm not gonna lie it's keeping me up at night a bit but i mean we knew this from day one like we knew that this is this is what we're aiming for very very very nice very nice i i think just answer one of my main questions i have for you is like who's the boss of district like who decides things is it the case there's no business team yeah that's what i mean by i mean at the end of the day somebody needs to make decisions like how this is done the website the logo you know that kind of thing right yeah yeah for now it has but uh uh by the end of the year i'm hoping to turn a me problem into eu problem and basically have the users uh take on a lot more work but also reap the rewards i just have one question for you sorry to interrupt and it's just one word how how what how are you going to turn your problem into the user's problem because well without it being chaos well see the second part is more important than the first because uh the i mean decentralized systems are great in many ways but uh reaching fast consensus and decision making is not necessarily one of the strong points the way it's going to happen is is through a tool called the service network system so what dfinity is working on right now is taking their their nns so the way the blockchain itself is being governed and using that as a model for um the service uh the sms the words are not with me today you guys using the sns to offer dapps you know basically plug-in governance so you have these parameters that you can change and tweak and use but in the end it's very similar to the way the nns work which allows you to pass proposals get them voted on and then they automatically deploy and they automatically make the changes to the network which means that the users can decide on stuff that is related to the way the token works uh and what they're going to do with the funds uh because we were talking about that they can decide stuff regarding new features if they want to accept new feature which features how they're going to be built by whom and and basically grow the platform we're not going to control our own smart contracts at that point so the these three smart contracts live in canisters um we have backhand canister front and acid canisters and all of those are going to be under the control of the sns each in turn is under the control of the token holders so any maintenance or bugs new feature releases they all need to go through the sms and be approved by the token holders okay but on the district network you also going to have users contribute with their own comments and publications and posts etc that is the bit that is before you get to the governance of the entire platform how do you stop that bit there from going into chaos through flame wars and people taking this is my tribe and i'm gonna get along with them and not the other ones and so on and so forth i'm sorry i know this is a question that would take you hours to answer if if you wanted to answer it you're asking too many questions it's a good question though it's good it's broad it's a very broad question that we can like to have a beer and talk about that this is the type of question barcelona so you could talk about that there i need i need some of the other uh attendees to also join i can see inuit i don't know i'm pronouncing your name wrong i know but it's also a friend of us uh he's probably also going to join the conference so go ahead and you you are even also romanian right yeah you have a little bit in common with andre there victoria hello so my name is jono okay how do i pronounce it sorry you're you're not you're not you're not you're close enough you're not you're not you're not close enough yeah yeah it works so my question was um is there any um paid advertising facts just i understood it you're not making any money off of this project but is there any sponsorship possibilities for projects um so regarding paid advertising we don't have that right now like being able like for instance to uh advertise your business on district right uh we don't have that right now and it's not in our immediate roadmap and it's something that we haven't included on purpose because we want to go this decision i think should be made by the community because advertising the business in itself is not a bad thing i think it should be on district what i think it should be up to the user is how we advertise it like what means do we use to put the content out there i have my own ideas and i think the best way we can um accomplish that in a efficient and fair way is through districts because this is why the platform is called district in its final stage it should be a community building tool so it should be imagine facebook groups and discord uh together in a web3 social media platform so in the same way that facebook has these communities in facebook groups we will have our own uh communities on district maybe investigated tokenized with their own governance and stuff like that this is our end goal with this platform not just to keep it you know in a twitter-like stage and i think advertising yeah i think advertising for businesses will be targeted via communities and not via sophisticated algorithms that collect and and correlate data yeah so yeah i wasn't thinking about collecting that maybe sorry i wasn't thinking about collecting data or things like this but maybe some pin posts or i don't know messages we are releasing messaging the messaging feature very soon we've uh actually we hoped to be releasing it today but uh i think it's going to be on monday life of a startup no friday releases so messaging might be a good way of doing that i think pinned post might be even better yeah i mean i haven't thought of something this simple because we've been very focused on delivering thank you we've been very focused on delivering our on our roadmap and advertising hasn't really been on the forefront of our efforts you can you can at least follow me on this particularly i will put your username in the chat yeah i did i i posted the link oh yeah i'll check it out very nice cool hopefully we also see you in barcelona yeah yeah oh yeah yeah very nice so i we we were supposed to finish at 6 central european time i mean let's take a few more questions because i do still see for example michael i think you haven't had the chance to ask your question hello where are you i'm in the uk in the uk where are you from i'm from italy from italy in the uk good go ahead um yeah i don't come from a technical background but so the first question comes to my mind was how do you showcase content without having uh without collecting data from the users so um as a user when i scroll through the page how do i uh yeah see the content you only see the content that you subscribed to in reverse chronological order so from the newest to oldest okay and if you want to discover new content you can go to the stream feed which is also a feed with all the content that's being posted on districts also from newest to oldest okay which sometimes is being taken over by bots especially if we're uh if we're uh mentioning any type of airdrops or if any airdrops are trending you're gonna see the stream being a bit flooded with reposts and stuff but usually it works as intended and you can discover new content and new new users there okay thank you yeah so no no fancy algorithms you just see what you subscribe to and yeah if you missed it you just need to scroll a bit more for now but we we are thinking of like notifications for when your favorite accounts are posting right so you can if you haven't logged in in a week and you want to see like you care about nine people on district you can the same way like alerts work right now on twitter basically okay thank you thanks thank you michael so i can see sergeia from our team so she's from slovenia but based in barcelona what's your question that's correct so my question is in regards to the censorship concerns right how are you monitoring uh sensitive topics are you monitoring them at all i'm thinking like sexual content or content about war is this being monitored yeah we now have a full-time moderator part of the district team that's working on this and we have a report system that works very well actually and the dashboard for moderation that team members check all of us basically check not just our moderator so whenever you go and you see something you can flag it to us you can report that you have categories and you can say this is um reported because it's a hate speech and it's being abusive this is reported because it's trying to scam people this is reported because the this account is impersonating somebody and we know it and stuff like that so the report and that moderation dashboard and our own in-house moderator help but it's something that needs to scale as the platform does and the thing that we're uh interested in is opening these tools to the community and asking our community to basically nominate uh moderators for district and give them access to our moderation tool in order for them to help us handle more more volume because we're almost at capacity with everything that we need to go through it's it's something of a ritual to go there like after i finish my day and it's 9 p.m i'm just squeezing in one more hour of looking up at our moderation dashboard because i know we just don't have the manpower to go through everything and i worry in this early stage this is why this is a very good question in this early stage the product is vulnerable it's vulnerable to be positioned in a way that you don't want it to be positioned so one big uh you know scandal or having district be the platform where something really bad happened could basically ruin its chance chances to make it so i feel very protective of that and i'm trying to encourage everybody to check that dashboard all the time so far to be honest i expected much worse like so far our users have been suspiciously well behaved we've had a few uh instances of really bad accounts but i think like less than 10 and we've been live for a year now like really really bad ones not just some people that are you know keyboard warriors and angry about stuff i mean racism or you know stuff that's uh really bad and we acted very quickly they they pop up every now now in a while and if you keep a an eye on you you'll catch them people report them really fast very nice thank you thank you for the question so guys yeah we are already 15 minutes over uh should we take one or more two questions and then and then i think i can only encourage you to to join us in barcelona and then you can meet andra there and her whole team because she's coming with i think another yeah 13 team members so they're going to be a whole gang gang bang from district so a lot of people to to meet there yeah i'm also bringing some cool people from the internet computer ecosystem at large so for our panel and stuff nice yeah i think people are very very excited to spend a few days in barcelona we're not talking about crypto because everybody's on board you too me too very very nice so i can see someone called our team is also going right yeah what team is also going our team oh team of course um queen do you wanna ask a question i don't know if it's a girl or a boy it's a queen it's a queen queen do you have a question no so then i think ta tassos was saying something in the chat did you want to ask a question is that your name yeah hi guys hello hello so i'm from greece national in your own country good uh so about the i think andra i've said something about um it's gonna give the problem to the to the user in the future uh i mean i thought something about that and let's say uh organizations like daos the aos no and all these decentralized organizations do the founders like uh still gain some personal income after they have already give the control let's say to the community does make sense how i say it i mean usually they have a generous allocation of their own tokens [Music] but in terms of the dow passing funds to the founding team after it's been like decentralized and it's user governed i think it depends on the model of each uh though i'm not familiar with any such project because for example for all these companies so far i mean at least the ones i know or for the web to companies all the founders have like um a stock uh not stock like um an equity percentage is it something similar with all let's say web three in decentralized organizations i mean [Music] it really depends i'm trying to think of a doubt that i actually consider a dao because most of them are let's say either not decentralized or not autonomous but they're definitely organizations so um if you take the internet computer and consider it dao and the nns being its governance module it doesn't work as you know a shareholder's meeting you don't have the same rights and responsibilities it's uh it's different and it doesn't pay the founding team anything in perpetuity no i don't see that hap i mean i'm not an expert in those to be honest i don't know all the models that dolls used to operate but if a dao would uh condition like if it would be like if i joined and i knew that uh it would pay fees or some sort of income to the founding team i would be very interested to know details like for how long and how come you can't really use tokens as i mean you can use them as securities but it doesn't give you the same rights as a shareholder right you can have a pro rata distribution of profit so if the project makes let's say 10 and you have 10 token holders and each one gets one dollar that would make sense but other than that i'm not familiar with uh anything [Music] okay no worries i mean it wasn't like a direct question i i was just curious because it just crossed my mind yeah and guessing you were thinking about like if i do a project in web 2 i already know the mechanisms that i can use to like have an exit and and you know make money out of my work whereas in web 3 is a bit different and we're going into the extreme opposite direction at districts so you're you're asking the wrong person because we're going like so far away from the web to model that it's alien to me i think more of a financial decentralized project would be way better suited to give you like more insights into how you could organize it okay thank you now that you mentioned android web 2 i was curious what do you think about elon musk trying to fix things like substantial shape stuff freedom of speech so things that web 3 fixes but using a web 2 model right so what do you think was your opinion on that i'm thinking like how controversial like my opinion very very controversial i have a great example to how i how i feel a ma musk tackling freedom of speech and this is something that i saw from somebody else on twitter that i thought was on point and that person said that there was this far right movement in the united states right that was denying that uh the holocaust happened and they were like very loud about it and they went to public newspapers and demanded to get their version of the truth published and when those newspapers refused they sued them for infringing freedom of speech and that's kind of the way i see elon musk's stance on freedom of speech i think we're all going to be free to agree with him if he takes over twitter and i think his disregard for factual based information is what worries me most i'm not a big fan of having an elon musk owned twitter platform i like twitter it's my favorite social media platform out there and i think it can definitely be improved i don't like the way it's handling moderation i don't like the way it's handling censorship i think this is why i'm so dedicated to districts you can do better and we're trying to do better but elon musk will be just i mean what's the improvement we we get we exchange one web to take bro with another like what's the improvement there i don't see it it's the same it's nothing's going to change if anything you're going to get even more bots and more hate speech because now it's allowed because freedom of speech now means also freedom of the consequences of your speech i don't know i don't get it it's messy but actually when we talk about freedom of speech it's it's actually very complex topic because i'm from denmark and i think denmark is one of the countries in the world where we have where we get the closest to freedom of speech so what happens is that you can actually have um you can have it like an organization where you're all in favor of a pedophilia what is the world in english you know where you like small kids yeah i mean it's quite insane so as as long as you don't do it as long as you don't do anything you have that right you can promote it you can promote you can be like that's cool and you can have a group and so so it's so freedom of speech is it yeah it's to another extreme and i even remember when i was young at some point like stuff like you know i don't know we have a queen in denmark and like so we've always had like okay so people would draw her naked and i mean nobody had seen her naked but i mean like and it's okay i mean i know in spain if someone is a bit too much it gets removed from the media so so denmark is so but then sometimes you ask yourself so okay is it necessary to have the right as a head of feel i don't know the word in english to meet with other people that agree that it's beauty to have sex with kids i know it's a bit extreme but this is this is okay in denmark you can meet with others yeah this is i mean this i think it's it's a very very fine line and i think we need to differentiate between enabling this course which is we i mean i think the the worst thing that the the woke movement did was to debilitate um you know debilitate you know controversial discussions like if you wanted to have a debate about pedophilia you couldn't and that's i don't think it's good like talking about it being aware about it having a healthy discussion about stuff any type of stuff it's different from promoting like objectively vile things i just like meeting with people and being like hey let's encourage this happening some more in the world because you know children think it's it's uh but it is a fine line and you can get drunk on power and you can decide that your version of what's right is objectively right so i don't want to be in that position to be the judge of if the user you know has a good opinion or not it's not my but as long as they don't promote violence to other humans in any way shape or form and they abide by basic human rights um i think discussions should be allowed but like promoting violence towards children is not a discussion that's not a debate that's objectively factually wrong and should be treated as such yeah in my opinion at least totally agree i guess we all agree here i mean isn't it this in everybody's opinion i'd be a bit worried if somebody was like i disagree no violence against children should be a love yeah it's a difference like between talking about if people are deranged in some way and how that works and understanding what happens to their in their head and trying to get them help and like trying to understand their point of view versus promoting stuff like that i think yeah yeah to totally agree okay so i think i asked before queen to send his questions or her questions uh so their majesty we can call them their majesty's question him or her we don't know what it is or maybe uh how was it uh gender-neutral okay whatever so the question is uh if this is so anonymous how do you deter trolls and dutchy unscrupulous individuals from playing mischief in there and if this is no no this is the same question sorry and then the other question is uh and can this platform this platform i guess district accommodate virtual reality technology similar to metadata so it's two different questions and queen is based in the uk queen elizabeth exactly so two questions i don't know if you got them but yes so the first one is basically how can how do we handle uh naughty users because it's so anonymous we rely mostly on communities community reporting bad stuff to us we analyze what we gather is actually activity the only thing that we know is uh how active a user is that's about it so the more active the more we try and keep an eye and make sure that because they're so popular they get like we don't want to see some really bad things like something you described right the only thing we do is make sure our terms and conditions are being respected but uh it's it's a handful we're having a lot of issues right now with managing the volume this is i think this was the answer to this question was basically uh answered a while back when i talked about moderation and the way we handle it to be honest it's the same answer we do have some trolls we do have some people that are trying to gain the system because they think they're going to get an airdrop or some sort of you know benefits we are trying to discourage that as much as possible the fact that we launched our own nfc collection was definitely a catalyst because uh we launched the collection of 10 000 unique nfts that are dynamic and we have a few surprises related to that and that got our users into a frenzy and we had a big wave of new subscriptions most of them are fake and we're trying to handle the volume that that announcement generated even now and it's been more than a month um and the second part what was the second question because i think it was related to the metaverse and vr stuff right yes so if it's possible to and can this platform can district accommodate virtual reality technology similar to metadata that's cool that's a cool question because we just had a call about this uh two days ago with a very talented team in china and they're doing of a metaverse completely on the internet uh computer and i think we will be able to see vr integration with the internet computer and i think that oh hi baby she needs to be like the youngest district user she needs her own account yeah so we we want our our discussion and our desire is to see a metaverse that leaves 100 on the internet computer and within that metaverse district can incorporate as much as this product as possible and that includes uh vr our head of design actually is a huge fan of this technology uh we have friends that work in this industry and we're very open to seeing it integrated uh with the blockchain like it would be an amazing fit i don't think we're there yet but i think if we come back to this question in two years time we will be surprised by how far we've come like having you know your news feed in vr and um having ways of meeting with people from your own district so people from your from your community in a vr room and and stuff like that i totally see that happening sooner than you probably imagined very very nice so i think guys uh we went over half an hour not good yeah it's good it's good because we could continue and i think i mean i can only encourage you to reach out to andra via twitter or district better district but if not i know you use twitter a lot i think you don't use that much linkedin anymore right um not really if i go there it's like once every two months i try like people are always like i i sent you something on linkedin and i hate it i really hate it so i hate you there don't use linkedin or if you don't have twitter then use linkedin uh if not also you can reach out to us if you wanted to receive some of the the material anders going to share with us and also very welcome to join us in barcelona when we have the seventh edition of the european blockchain convention andra is joining there with her team we are as well of course with our team and also i encourage you to see our courses at european tech school maybe daniel you can share a link in the chat box so andra thank you so much thank you so much for sharing your your project i think it's amazing uh and i think it's an amazing experience victoria can you shut up yes someone wants to say something someone said victoria can you shut up it's very direct but if someone wants to say something is it is that really what he said i don't know i read it like that no nothing was to say anything okay so um andra thank you for sharing your story thank you for sharing what you're building this district that was hilarious though yeah i don't know i mean that was a troll i think right i think so yeah you gotta have one like if you don't have any waiters you haven't done anything worthwhile exactly exactly yes i agree with hundreds yeah yeah someone is someone there it's like that one guy from the wedding that is dancing you know funny yeah exactly so okay guys um thank you andrew so much for being with us here today thank you everyone for joining thank you for your question i think it was like very very nice questions as i said reach out to her reach out to us if you need anything from us and android that's really fun thank you good to see you in a bit yeah any final words before we we say good night i was going to say not good night but good evening i think well you guys should definitely check out our project if you want to build something really cool you should check out the internet computer we are very happy with the the way the tech works and with our developing experience and yeah follow us on twitter and on district and tag me for whatever you need i'm very responsive i do not sleep i live online basically and what what do you need andra like if you can ask are you hiring or like how can we help you or help district we're not hiring right now but we are looking to gather a lot of feedback so just go in test the app um at the top of your feed you're gonna see a box where we ask for feedback we review that every week every monday we have a session and review the feedback it's very good like our users have have helped us tremendously to find uh you know weak points and strong points and stuff and just going through the onboarding process going through the experience and letting us know what you think or where you think we could improve that will help us tremendously and if you like it yeah share it share it with somebody help us get some more exposure and and you know give people an alternative that would be cool fantastic thank you andre thank you everyone for joining and see you see you online yeah thank you everyone on real world in barcelona yeah bye bye guys thank you bye thanks thanks bye bye thanks bye benoit we should place some music or something right yeah we should play some music yeah well if not alexander can can scream a bit that was nice i think i heard someone said shut up victoria or am i wrong it's it's it's it's good to have some trolls thank you katarina thank you bye yeah i'm not seeing now the chat i just saw so got it thank you thank you leah good to see you here and renee and ready oh yeah rene was here as well that's true oh long time we haven't seen him nice to see you here i don't know if you're still here katarina thank you baby here ignaci costas oh yeah yeah yeah i saw him as well thank you for joining cool so i think we should close close the medium right see you guys see you bye