clusters and items

[Southclaws]

Storyden and how it may fit into ecom curation without locking itself too far into that domain and still fulfilling the forum goal and generic Wordpress-for-social goal.

Currently we have posts, categories and collections which are effectively all about content and specifically written content (though it can easily extend to media content where one post = one video or multiple photos for example)

If threadbase were to be implemented using SD then this model may not be ideal. Mainly because searchability is determined by rich text and tags rather than structured grouping into brands and styles. For the Houseplant index this also falls down as there’s a finite and discrete set of possible plants but an unlimited growing set of written content that could reference said plant species.

Another concern here is also that if collections were to be social then perhaps they should also have a single parent post that acts as a form of description/thesis/overview.

So, my thoughts for solving this are to maybe introduce two new data models to the system that can act as a form of generic item container/grouping. These could fit into the forum model but also expand out to structured wiki, index, database, producthunt, kind of product direction. I think this is also most likely where the most monetisation and partnership opportunities are and eventually perhaps, as the traditional forum market dies down as a social protocol, where curation can survive and live on lies within the curation product itself.

Of course these would be opt in features for communities and the naming would remain very generic so it doesn’t immediately scream ecom and look like some kind of weird illegitimate tiktok-meets-shopify love child (even though that’s ultimately what I want to build)

So here are the details:

• item: an individual object class such as a piece of apparel, a plant species, a weapon in a video game, an… NFT??? Essentially this would act as a structured model that represents things that aren’t rich text written long form content. Of course items can live within categories, have tags and posts can reference items and items can reference posts - this allows authors to write SEO friendly articles about specific products while maintaining the ability to separate these two concepts when it comes to displaying, searching and indexing them. This I think is a better approach to Wordpress where all concepts must fit into their strict everything-is-a-post-within-a-category because it’s a clearer distinction between written qualitative content and discrete quantitative things.
• brand: I’m hesitant to use the word brand here just because of the aforementioned preference to generic terminology in order to not creep too close to ecom too early, but for the lack of a better name, this will do for now. A brand is just a name for a thing that contains items. Like a post has a category, an item has a brand. But, again, aiming to be more structured and collection focused in order to tackle those product hunt, threadbase, plant index style products. I’m unclear whether items should have one or many brands as streetwear often involves collaborations. Plant species don’t have brands and they essentially all exist in one huge list (ignoring all the sciencey taxonomy) but this could be useful for indicating where to buy them. Though if that same idea were to be applied to brands, it gets messy as we would need a new model most likely to represent the possible places that sell brands or items… it gets complicated there and too ecom focused for now. Cross that bridge later!

SD stock installations would have the ability to enable item based curation or brand based curation or both in admin settings. This would allow forum operators to essentially upgrade from a content hub to a content hub that also has a wiki of game items or a list of brands.

Along with this should also be the option for enabling user submissions for populating both items and brands while also providing an option for staff reviewing submissions for content moderation purposes.

Overall it feels like scope creep still but I’m also concerned about the long term TAM associated purely with written content because of the rise of AI, apparent death of SEO and just the general ongoing centralisation of social activity on the open web. Even with things like ActivityPub and big Fediverse players like Threads, and varying opinions about privacy, forums are probably not a good long term bet.

That being said, the forum model is still a great OSS market hole to fill for now while using it as a low effort low cost marketing strategy. Open source also continues to offer benefits in the code review space for Makeroom and noteworthy in library communities such as Segun’s Chakra and possibly more partnerships if I can get something rolling with other possibly interested folks. If SD can work well as a “real world example” of certain novel technology products such as Next.js, swr, Fly.io, Panda CSS, Chakra UI, Vercel, and more, then that’s another great funnel.

The end goal with this OSS approach is pretty much just become “Wordpress for X” where our X is community curation.

In the long game, say 2024+, if we can get plugins working well along the trajectory of WASM, that’s not only another real world example marketing channel but could also be the catapult into actual full monetisation via hosted platform with plugin marketplace. The golden goose here (unlike Wordpress) is that Storyden.com will then not only have the best market position for hosting enterprise instances but also provides deep application level integration and extension support without the need for customers to self host - and even if they do there’s a big opportunity for support contracts here too.

Ultimately, Storyden is in a position to really disrupt discussion and community curation while also both utilising and empowering open source communities to be the next internet platform in the same way Wordpress basically powered the internet for the last two decades.

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