Fireside: Co-Building Edge City Social App Summary
Video
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Summary
This fireside chat explored the vision for building a decentralized social app tailored to the needs of the Edge City community during their month-long gathering in Chiang Mai. Edge City aims to accelerate human flourishing through experimental technology and social innovation.
Key concepts discussed included leveraging blockchain infrastructure like Flow to enable seamless user experiences and scalability for next-generation social apps. The goal is to move beyond the unhealthy dynamics of current mainstream social media toward tools that facilitate productive community engagement, voice sharing, group coordination, and serendipitous connections.
A unique aspect is the immersive format, allowing participants to rapidly prototype concepts using Edge City as a living laboratory, gathering real-time feedback from the diverse global participants. Potential technical challenges include designing intuitive decentralized architectures, while social challenges involve fostering genuine connection aligned with human flourishing values amidst rapid technological change.
The hackathon presents an opportunity to develop a minimum viable social app product with the potential for future support from Edge City, Flow Foundation, and other partners. Speakers emphasized removing constraints and dreaming ambitiously about defining new paradigms for decentralized social experiences.
Key Takeaways
- Current social media promotes unhealthy individual consumption over community engagement
- Decentralized apps packaged with intuitive user experiences are needed to realign incentives
- Edge City offers a unique immersive environment to rapidly prototype and user test concepts
- Key needs include group coordination, voice sharing, facilitating serendipitous connections
- Leveraging blockchain infrastructure like Flow can enable seamless user experience at scale
- Partnerships with cutting-edge communities create synergies for ambitious new paradigms
- Hackathon offers opportunity to build MVP for potentially long-term support/development
Speakers
- Speaker A: Anthony from Flow Foundation
- Role: Leading blockchain focused on consumer user experience
- Expertise: Decentralized application development, blockchain scalability
- Key contributions: Encouraging ambitious vision, offering Flow infrastructure/resources
- Speaker B: Janine Langer, Edge City Co-Founder
- Role: Cultivating global community for accelerating human flourishing
- Expertise: Social innovation, immersive experiences
- Key contributions: Articulating problems with existing social media, key needs for new apps