Polkaverse

A brief on the functionalities and role of Polkaverse in community-building within the Polkadot ecosystem.

What is Polkaverse?

Polkaverse is a decentralised social media platform that facilitates content creation, sharing, and monetisation for web3 communities. It aims to serve as a hub for the free exchange of information on various ecosystem-related topics. Polkaverse is currently maintained by DappForce (a team of open source developers) and has been running on the Subsocial blockchain since its inception.

How-to: Building Spaces for Ecosystem Interactions

Onboarding Polkaverse is a well-staged multistep process that starts with connecting a Polkadot account via a non-custodial wallet. The basic functionalities of Polkaverse involve setting up user profiles, choosing interests, and registering human-readable usernames for your accounts. The platform also facilitates creating spaces (i.e for publishing blog posts, disseminating infographics, or sharing videos) and receiving custom notifications.

Each Polkaverse space represents a specific area of interest or a community where users can write opinion pieces and discuss ecosystem projects while keeping an open record of their interactions. Unlike popular Web2 social media platforms like Twitter, Discord, and Reddit that are more time-consuming to navigate, searching for information on Polkaverse is done in one click and provides the most relevant posts for any keywords.

Polkaverse also gives visitors and readers the chance to voice their opinion on blog posts through reactions, comments, upvotes, or downvotes. To manage interactions and limit the amount of spam posts on the platform, users need to obtain Energy, which is used to settle platform operations on-chain. Polkaverse allows users to tip blog authors, and this feature will be extended into a full suite of Social Finance (SoFi) protocols to support creator staking and social media monetisation.

The landing page of Polkaverse.

Risks: Mitigating Censorship and Misinformation

Since publishing and discussing content on Polkaverse happens in a decentralised manner, users can encounter poorly-researched posts that are more speculative than factual. This can lead to misinformation and rumours being relayed beyond the reach of ecosystem teams and communities. In this context, visitors should look for an official green checkmark and make sure that the spaces that they browse are vetted by a good number of followers and up-to-date publications.

As with most social media platform, space publishers are at the mercy of viewers and readers because reactions remain permanently visible. Authors who want to promote alternative viewpoints or counterpoints to established narratives run the risk of becoming the target of smear campaigns from pseudonymous accounts. Space owners should therefore set clear rules for their spaces and routinely moderate the content posted.

It is important to note that all posts created on Polkaverse are stored on IPFS via Crust Network, which provides built-in resilience to de-platforming through decentralised storage. However, it is still possible for third-party storage providers linked to the platform to go offline and limit access to existing content. Creators always have the option to set up their own IPFS node, store their data independently, and provide a direct link to their content from their Polkaverse spaces.