Recently, @dimitarvp expressed interest in the use case of a forum driven by ibGib. This happens to be the use case I had just mentioned to @AstonJ when he was being an awesome admin here and merged my public posts for the @wraiford account (btw I can’t respond directly to DMs there as that account is now locked). So since it’s come up twice, and it’s a definitely awesome early use case for ibGib, I wanted to speak to it.
ibGib as a Forum
ibGib is self-similar, so it’s a perfect fit for recursive patterns. Forums are one such pattern, with the forum itself being the top-level “post” with the poster being the company/entity forum admin. Each category, e.g., Lounge, Elixir News, Elixir Chat, etc., is a child “post” of the top-level one (but restricted to the forum admin/site creator). Each topic created in that category is then a child of that. In the current state of ibGib, a rudimentary version of this already available. But what would ibGib offer over current solutions?
ibGib Advantages
- Beyond block chain features
- Immutable
- Content-addressed
- Fully versioned with audit history
- Hash-based data integrity
- Easy Immersion and Context
- For example, I’ve recently started “gardening” (farming really…) and keep track of it in ibGib. You can check out my current winter garden or even my entire back yard - remember you can click on most of the ibGib and navigate to them and there will be children ibGib.
- But say I have a bug on a plant that I don’t know, e.g. these aphids or weird millipede things. I have these tagged as bugs for my personal use, but in a forum context, I should be able to publish a new “post” or “question” that then gets queued like a question on Stack Exchange. But in this case, the user would be able to just click on it, and they could be instantly immersed in the rest of the garden for context and may be able to spot other things in addition to providing help on that one thing.
- Note that these are two views of the same data: 1) Personal Note App (kinda like time-based Google Keep or a “git notes”), and 2) Publicly tagged interaction “forum”.
- Also note that this doesn’t have to be a human responding to the question.
- Since people are given identities in exactly the same way as AI/ML autonomous services would be given identities (check out the “identity” rel8n for any ibGib e.g. here), the handler for the question tag queue could be an autonomous service (“micro-service” sigh) that analyzes the pic and if it’s found to be a known bug it could provide the answer/info with links automatically! Humans would be busy generating their own gardens/source code/domain data, as well as be the ones who resolve very tough questions.
- It should be readily apparent that this structure would seemlessly integrate with both Augmented and Virtual Reality.
- Augmented for browsing, etc., when interacting with the “forum”.
- Virtual when used to generate other other ibGib artifacts (environments for a game e.g.) within a completely virtual
- The analog to “the garden” in programming would be the source code. You could simply tag your code question there, or create a comment in that code that is itself the question that you will tag (and the answerers would navigate “upwards” if needed). The real-world code is the environment, just as the surrounding garden is the environment in the given example domain, and the answerer could navigate it if applicable.
- “BS Filtering”
- For example, you can accept advice from people who actually generate their own gardens, as opposed to…
- Armchair quarterbacks.
- Paid employees with a superficial agenda, i.e. professional endorsements outside of their profession for products that they don’t actually use.
- Down with the Internet of Ads!
- Trolls, either innocuous or malicious
- Fake reviews
- Fake news
- Bots
- This also generates the ability for lifetime reviews of products.
- This would act like automatic product registration.
- Provides a feedback mechanism to the manufacturers of goods beyond surveys.
- and more…
- For example, you can accept advice from people who actually generate their own gardens, as opposed to…
Going Forward
As I said, I wanted to give a little insight into the forum-like experience possible and how it would integrate with the other services. Notifications are almost complete, and with a little more work, PubSub functionality could very easily integrate the Twitter-plus experience. Simply a better image viewing/gallery experience already replicates existing Pinterest-like experience. The list goes on and on, and these things are not even that difficult. There are a couple hard problems left that I’m still working on, but there is a lot of low-hanging fruit for some advanced functionality. But it’s relatively slow because I’m getting to be an old man and I can’t code 12+ hours a day every day anymore.
Of course, there is still a ton of work to be done going forward to get full functionality of current forums. But it should be apparent that this underlying technology enables an entirely new experience for integration of our current paradigms, forums being only one of them. Basically, just fiddle around with the app and imagine what can be done by more people who don’t suck at front-end UI coding…
Thanks again for your interest @dimitarvp, and thanks again @AstonJ for your help with my accounts and all your work on this forum.