Posts and Spaces

The building blocks of Subsocial are Spaces, posts, comments, upvotes, downvotes, and follows. They will be familiar to everyone who has used any social media platform.

The best way to understand them is through comparison to familiar platforms:

Spaces are similar to:

• Blogs on Blogger,
• Publications on Medium,
• Accounts, pages, or groups on Facebook,
• Accounts on Twitter and Instagram,
• Channels on YouTube,
• Servers on Discord,
• Forums on Discourse,
• Subreddits on Reddit.

Posts are similar to:

• Posts on Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit,
• Articles on Medium,
• Tweets on Twitter
• Videos on Youtube.

Comments are simply posts that have a parent, and comments can be nested.

Upvotes and downvotes are reaction types, and follows allow for the creation of a social graph.

How about something more advanced? How can we recreate popular platforms for Web3 using Subsocial?

• Airbnb – apartment listings are spaces, while reviews are posts.
• Quora – a question is a post, answers are comments/replies.
• Stack Overflow –
  • Answers can be rewarded, e.g. by the question asker.
  • The distribution of payouts can also be split between what the question asker and what the community finds to be the best answer.
• Patreon/OnlyFans – subscribing users can be granted access to a private space or private posts.

All posts and spaces are associated with public key pairs (accounts). This means all content can be correctly attributed to the post's author and/or owner. The cryptography used is the same as found in Polkadot. Subsocial supports multiple web browser extensions that allow for easy key management in the browser, in addition to a solution for email and password sign-on.