New Horizons: Subsocial's H1 2024 Roadmap

Subsocial’s development progress is still moving steadily along, but with the conclusion of 2023, we are now outlining new goals for the future, specifically the first half of 2024. Following the release of Creator Staking and token transfers, the focus is on growing Subsocial’s social graph, increasing the Creator Staking system’s beneficial effects, decentralizing the network, improving the user experience, and marketing. Let’s look at these in more detail.

Creator Staking v1.0

The Creator Staking beta has gotten off to a great start! Over 62 million tokens have been staked so far by over 1,500 stakers!

Based on the observations we’ve made during the beta period, we are looking to make some adjustments.A long standing habit of participants in staking systems is to “stake and forget.” While this may be okay in ordinary staking systems, it presents some problems for Creator Staking. New creators will have a very hard time acquiring stake, as stakers are unlikely to even know about new creators, and it doesn’t push stakers to continue using the network. On top of this, despite being Registered Creators and receiving rewards, some creators are still not working to grow Subsocial. They either don’t post on PolkaVerse, don’t interact with their communities on Grill.chat, or don’t mention Subsocial on other social networks. In some cases, all of the above.

Enter Active Staking, which will be launching in alpha soon. While details are still being ironed out, the Active Staking system will incentivize creators to routinely produce content, and increase network activity from token holders. On top of this, creators that become inactive will have a much harder time being staked towards, as the network is interested in supporting active creators.

Mainnet Protocol Upgrades

Many new features have been released on Subsocial over the past few months, however, they were rolled out on the xSocial testnet, which has supported Grill.chat since launch. xSocial was launched to serve as a test environment for rapid iteration and experimentation, featuring lower block times for a better UX on grill. These features, including the ability to link EVM wallets to Polkadot wallets or create discussions about any entity or resource, will be migrated to Subsocial’s mainnet along with Grill.chat.

While messages previously sent on Grill will not migrate, the application and relevant pallets will, and all messages on Grill going forward will live on Subsocial’s mainnet, creating cohesion between Grill and PolkaVerse, in preparation for FanFair.

FanFair

We consider Creator Staking to be one of the key contributors to Subsocial’s success, and are building a new application based on Grill.chat to fully integrate Subsocial’s social features with Creator Staking, all in one sexy user interface.

Aimed at growing Subsocial’s social graph, and onboarding more creators, FanFair will introduce a new points-based gamification system!

Users will earn points for using FanFair, and can contribute points towards creators. Every two weeks, the ten creators with the most points contributed towards them will be crowned victorious, and have extra SUB staked towards them by the DappForce team for two weeks, until the next round ends.

While Creator Staking lets you support creators with your tokens, points will let you support them with your actions as well, working together as part of a creator’s community to ensure they make it to the top ten!

The team is super excited to get FanFair out to the public, providing creators with an amazing application for growing and interacting with their communities, with Creator Staking baked into the foundation. A big marketing push will coincide with FanFair’s launch, bringing many more creators on to the platform to ensure the competition is lively!

Fanfair is expected for Q1 of 2024.

Decentralization

Operating from the principle of progressive decentralization, Subsocial is moving towards a more decentralized future. The network’s collator set will be expanding soon, improving performance and resiliency, and the network will transition towards on-chain governance to handle future runtime upgrades, treasury management, and XCM channel requests.

Sub.ID & OpenComm

In 2023, the team behind Subsocial received funding from the Polkadot treasury for the further development of both Sub.ID and OpenComm, and work is still underway.

The final feature to complete the work outlined in the latest Sub.ID proposal is P&L analytics, including a dashboard and charts, with multi-account aggregation. This feature will be available for all profiles, not just yours, so anybody doing some social exploring or chain sleuthing will have even more tools at their disposal.

The OpenComm proposal will be completed with the final touches next year, including a better moderation system and a robust communication platform for Polkadot’s governance system. After all, it doesn’t make sense to use centralized platforms to manage governance in a decentralized ecosystem.

Marketing Agency

For the last few months, our team has been working with a marketing agency named “Creators Agency”, in order to improve the design of Subsocial’s systems to boost virality and engagement.

A big part of their work has been developing a sticky gamification system for FanFair, increasing re-engagement, and making people feel like they have a real stake in their favorite creators, driving more traffic to the platform and ultimately boosting network growth.

Creators Agency has also been helping with creator outreach, contacting hundreds of creators in preparation for FanFair’s launch.

The more, the merrier!

The first half of 2024 will be awesome for Subsocial, as the platform matures, and the wider Polkadot ecosystem continues to grow and reach some notable milestones. A viral app is just what Subsocial needs, and FanFair will be exactly that! More information on FanFair will be out soon, and until then, we’ll see you on-chain!