Community Financed Infra-Hosting and Upkeep

Community Financed Infra-Hosting and Upkeep === Project Goal: Starting point Decentralized voice chat similar to clubhouse MVP: Voice chat app that anyone can use, setup, participate in, host - Etc Centralized Axioms --- A centralized approach to voice chat requires some sort of centralized infrastructure to host the backend. This is the simplest method to achieve the latency and uptime and accessability required for an app to actually work. This incurs costs that must be billed to someone, somewhere, in order to pay for the hosting and maintenance of the backend. In theory, the infra can be run on any major cloud provider. It may be easiest to score compute credits with a cloud provider by using all of their offerings, but that creates the risk of vendor lock-in. None of this is a problem for a centralized approach. Decentralized Considerations --- A decentralized approach to this application is much like the centralized approach in that the infrastructure is the same, and must be hosted somewhere by someone. This in turn requires an upkeep cost, but who will pay for it? Ultimately this platform has to be supported by the people using the platform. This means we cannot have the costs of running the platform provided by proceedes of a data analytics firm that mines the user data for profit. We need another source of income. This is where the community engagement and micropayment structure comes in. The infrastructure is used by both chat listeners, and by active voice participants. Just like a twitch stream, the listeners are able to access the conversation for free, though participation is limited to just chat. In the twitch model, the streamer host receives donations from viewers that appreciate the content that the streamer is creating, and want to support the cause. In a similar model, the listeners of a particular voice chat room may enjoy the well prodeuced content, the conversations, and overall the vibe they get from being able to get whatever content this chat room provides. Consumers will be incentivized to contribute to the operating costs of the room-hosts, scheduled content, and good moderation. All of this is community focused, and perhaps the community may be able to drive the topics or content collaboratively, because they support the channel financially. Now we have the streamers -- the chat room hosts, mods, and admins. They are responsibile for hosting the infra that powers the chat, and also curating and moderating the content of the room. They can create financing goals for hosting, content, etc, that are transparent to the community such that viewers/listeners know exactly what they are contributing towards when they donate. Think a monthly upkeep chart that shows how much has been donated, how much is needed, and a donate button. This is effectively a patreon, but with real transparancy into what the money is being spent on. In conclusion, we now have a community driven financing model to fund hosting costs and maintenance. This allows hosts and viewers to operate without a subscription fee, but with an opt in donation channel -- akin to what most people are used to with modern streaming platforms. To make this all work, we now need infrastructure that is completely isometric in design. By this I mean there is no restriction on what platform is chosen to host the chat so long as it is a modern cloud provider that supports terraform, chef, or any other provisioning workflows. In effect, it should be click to deploy. Even at a super small scale like a laptop. (For testing it out etc) A great example of such an application is [Metabase](https://www.metabase.com/). Infra and Architecture --- In the most simple case, the entire application consists of a chat server, and a chat client. For simplicity, lets refer to those components as "community-host" and "client-app" Channel Directory Perhaps there is some community directory of all the hosted nodes. ### Community-Host Backend hosted component that runs the actual voice chat, contains the room state, ssl-encryption, and microtransaction backend, database, etc. Client apps connect to this backend through a URL. ### Client-App ###### tags: Brainstorming, Vision, Payment, Ecosystem, Microtransactions