Greetings Community,
TL;DR: Can we work together to build & deploy a set of bots to log ALL the BCH chat rooms from Telegram, Discord, Slack, Wechat, etc; then publish those logs to a “public”, “searchable”, “open-source”, “mobile-friendly” web portal? How does that sound?
PRO: 100% transparency & discoverability for ALL Bitcoin-related communications.
CON: a permanent log of ALL Bitcoin-related “toxic” communications.
( hmm, maybe this will encourage better behavior?? )
BEGIN RANT >>>
As many of you who know me know, I don’t participate in the Telegram or Discord communities, by choice. An open (albeit read-only) communications system like this would allow someone like me to still have access to the wealth of knowledge and wisdom that comes from those discussion groups.
Personally, I don’t want to read your Telegram chats. It’s not fun. Not even a little bit. But I would love to have the ability to search those channels when I’m in need of information that’s being locked behind those walls; and I suspect the same would be true for ANY new arrivals (read. BUILDERS) that come exploring what Bitcoin Cash has to offer.
<<< END RANT
Introduction
The goal is to unlock the knowledge being guarded behind proprietary social networks that are neither indexable (by search engines) nor accessible to everyone (eg. GFW). TLDR.cash will serve as a convenient web client to a very simple and open specification:
{gateway} / {network} / {channel} / {date} /
as an example:
https://tldr.cash/telegram/bchgang/20211115/
alternatively, daily logs will be mirrored to IPFS and accessible via ANY private/public gateway:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmVKjeXjxe49b5etyT9Rt6WZ3f4rYRCKLhibHbc7AG1EEe
Publicly Accessible
It’s important that this portal be PUBLIC. That way search engines (ie. DuckDuckGo, Google, etc) can index the pages and make the contents discoverable through general web searches.
NOTE: Either Server Side Rendering (SSR) or pre-rendering will be used to optimize the pages for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Content Search
At the top of each page will be a searchbar for quickly locating channel content and filtering the results.
(see campaign goals below for a description of a proposed Global Search feature)
Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
All logs will be written to IPFS. Links will be published: daily, weekly and monthly for ALL sources. An index of the daily IPFS hashes will be stored & read from a SmartBCH smart contract, making seeding/mirroring trivial for others that wish to participate and support this system.
Mobile-friendly
It is critical that this information be conveniently accessible from any device, but mobile is especially important as that’s where most “users” consume their information. Extra care will be taken to develop this UI/UX.
Uncle Satoshi (is everyone’s favorite bot)
So, I attempted to actually build this system over a year ago using Matrix’s bridging add-ons from their respective social networks. At that time, it was meant to be a two-way communications system. In the end I found it too buggy to be practical.
The difference now is that I’m suggesting a READ-ONLY system. This is far simpler to implement, as each network natively supports “chat bots” that can be added to any room.
Uncle Satoshi is a crypto bot that I wrote about a year ago to help perform simple crypto tasks in my Slack channels. This bot would be my starting point. I plan to simply modify it as needed for this project and/or as requested by the community.
NOTE: I’m more than happy to open-source Uncle Satoshi for the purpose of this project.
Next Steps
Things are already pretty much ready to go, but I couldn’t possibly go it alone. Sooo…
I’ll need volunteers to maintain active (bot-enabled) accounts on each of the supported social networks (preferably a different person/org for each network):
- Discord
- Slack
- Telegram
( are there any more chat bot-enabled networks that should be added to the list above? )
I’ll need to coordinate with a moderator for each channel that is willing to participate in this system and install the Uncle Satoshi bot:
- BCHGang (Telegram)
- BCHN: General (Slack)
- BlockHackGlobal (Discord)
( yeah, i’m sure there are like a million more )
PLEASE NOTE: I’ll be available to start this project after Nov 15th, as I first need to complete a handful of previous commitments. Feel free to reach out to me directly between now and then if you’re interested in supporting this effort.
Source code - Bitcoin Please / TLDR · GitLab
Docs - https://docs.tldr.cash
And then…
Why not a crowdfunding campaign?
If this initial MVP is successful, I’d recommend a crowdfunding campaign (either Flipstarter or Smartstarter) to extend the platform’s capabilities and utility to the community. A few ideas for campaign goals:
Human Translations
The most “popular” threads would be translated to English, Spanish & Chinese. Funding for the translation work would be provided for using a “tipping/upvotes” pool.
Global Search
On the homepage will be a “global” searchbar, powered by an Elasticsearch database. The database will use an API https://api.tldr.cash that will be hosted by private VPS. Elasticsearch is a highly-performant search engine that shouldn’t have a problem serving even the highest query demands of the BCH community.
Support Message Boards & Repos
We would include the ability to log activities from non-bot sources, like message boards and code repositories. This could be through the use of API services or web-scrapping techniques.
Personal Pages & Content Feeds
Any individual could register their own feed.
There would probably be some form of a “staking” system (managed by a smart contract) to reserve usernames.
Smartstarter P2P Volunteer Crowdfunding
I beg your pardon, but for the next 2 weeks I’m be obliged to mention that my ALL NEW crowdfunding platform is running a Flipstarter (Smartstarter - Peer-to-Peer Crowdfunding), and your support is very much appreciated 
Cheers!
Shomari
