Twitter Space - 01

 Only 2 participants joined the First Space at 4PM Mountain Time earlier today. Interesting discussion overall! Summary follows.

Held the first Twitter space earlier today. The intention was to talk about TalkShop and lay out my vision and the way forward for this venture.

Only 2 participants joined this First Talk. Good start nevertheless! ☺️

Discussion Summary

(adding some context to items left unsaid on Call in Fuchsia).

1. As elucidated in my original post, TalkShop will be a blogging platform with an integrated News Syndication Service where members can post their views on Current Events or any topic under the sun either in the form of Long Form Blogs or short 255 character texts.
   
   
2. News Syndication Service (NSS) will collate news from various sources and present them to Members for discussion. NSS will use AI to rate the News Source in terms of Political Ideology (Left/Right) but will NOT filter any content at any time. Individual Subscribers may choose to opt for the NSS providers/Topics they wish to block out at their discretion. More discussion required during Feature Discussions.
   
   
3. Twitter/FB often get blocked in individual countries as despotic rogue regimes seek to push out narratives and silence critics. TalkShop will attempt to develop a way to bypass country restrictions on Content. While this is not feasible on the Web Platform, we will attempt to find a way to do this on Mobile platform and Desktop Apps in the future.
   
   
4. TalkShop will be a community-owned and run platform where people can freely  express themselves without fear or intimidation. We will operate under US law & jurisdiction but we will not share Member data with anyone for whatever reason!
   
   
5. Importance of TalkShop being community-owned. We wont be subject to the same commercial and other pressures that sites like Twitter/FB operate under.
   
   
6. TalkShop API will be a platform to build not just the core App but it will also be made available to other Community/Affinity Groups to build their own Community Spaces (CS). This could be alumni-groups, interest groups like Aviation Lovers, History aficionados, "Bangalore Lawyers Collective", "Army Kids" and so on.  A dedicated site for Aviation Discussions is the first of the CS planned.
   
   
7. TalkShop being subscription based. While not driven by commercial interest, the site still needs to be able to generate enough funds to keep running! Gave the example of WikiPedia which has to raise funds through donations every year to keep running which is a recurring challenge. Subscription fee, even something as low as $2/mo or $25/year, will help keep the app going. Pricing is one of the items to be discussed in detail going forward.
   
   
8. Running Costs. TalkShop will be designed from the ground up with a focus on keeping running costs low. So Linux Servers and use of Open Source as far as possible. The annual cost of a base 3 Linux server configuration is $2400. This is the bare minimum to keep things running. As the number of users grow, we will keep expanding the number of servers in 3-unit increments. These additional servers could be located in various geographical regions to improve latency.
   
   
9. Startup Cost. We need $6000 to get things moving and we can have the beta version of the App going within 4 months of launch. So assuming we raise the funds this month, we will begin development in December 2024 and have the Beta out by April 2025.
   
   
10. TalkShop is happening regardless of how the funding goes! This is a deeply personal project for me. Raising these funds will just make the project happen NOW!
    
    
11. Raising Funds. The first 1000 members to contribute $25 will be Founding Members who will have access to the App for life. This will generate the corpus to develop and sustain the product at launch.
    
    
12. Founding Members also have another role to play. They will play a key role in helping to design the app interface and prioritize the development of the Feature List on the app. We will have one server running within the first month(December) where we will setup a discussion board (running on TalkShopAPI 😅 allowing Founding Members to contribute their views on the Product.

The discussion then digressed to other topics like the rising cost of Living in Canada, the rental Scene in GTA/Vancouver area and looking at crime stats before moving to the US! 🫠

It was fun to discuss the TalkShop idea in person with other individuals and I think we should do this more often - like Daily! I need to hear ideas from other folks too!

Perhaps it was a bad idea to hold it at 4PM Mountain Time! Since most of my followers are in India, perhaps we should be holding the Daily Twitter space at a convenient time in India? Do let me know in the comments below what time would work best.

Thanks & Regards.