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Qbix Platform was originally borne out of a vision to decentralize social networking. The recent release of version 1.0 lays the groundwork for the coming revolution. It is the “WordPress” of social networks. Here is what it achieves already:
- Communities can run their own social network and release their own apps in app stores, which can gain access to contacts, notifications, etc. on user devices.
- People can manage their accounts across communities, and selectively share their identities with people in their private address book, without revealing them to others.
- Our apps in the store help people communicate, discover new communities, apps, venues and interests that their friends have shared.
- They also let websites give an instantly social experience to members and visitors, by anonymously showing what people they know have already posted
- Communities can host group activities for their members and guests to engage in, like planning events, driving each other, making group reservations, dating, pitching in for gifts, and much more.
- Developers and startups around the world can build apps and sell them to communities, without a central gatekeeper.
Groups App
The Groups app has been downloaded by over 5 million people in over 110 countries, and enjoys a 4.5 / 5 star average over thousands of reviews. It currently helps people message each other, but we are working to soon turn it into something much bigger.
The Groups App will be able to host a Browser, like Chrome for iOS and Android, but with new, social features.
- It will allow the user to maintain secure accounts with websites and services, without needing passwords.
- By integrating with a user’s address book, it will let people discover websites, communities, interests and venues that their friends have shared with them, and the content they contributed to there.
- It will let websites present an anonymous, yet instantly personalized social experience upon entering, showing what friends from their address book have been up to.
- It will allow people message each other securely and privately, and collaborate on group activities across different websites.
- Websites will be able to have their visitors share their activities with friends, and invite them to the website to join the activities, driving more people to the community.
- Developers will be able to build new kinds of apps and activity types (e.g. a chess game, chat, trip planning, music mix, etc.) and websites would host the data on the back end.
Groups Browser will make the web more social and secure by default. It empowers private user control of their own identity and connections –– their own address book –– rather than relying on third party servers like Facebook’s to store and own their friend list. It emphasizes group collaboration towards a goal (making a reservation, planning a trip, contributing to a gift or music mix, researching a subject) over endless sharing and commenting on online content.
Qbix Platform 2.0
Note that the Platform 1.0 allows community servers to know and control everything on their own network, similarly to how Facebook is able to do it now. This is what many community organizations want: they can set roles and permissions, moderate content, and so on. In short, whoever has access to the database can have a lot of control and access to what goes on in the community.
The next version of of the Qbix Platform will start giving even more people to the people. People will have the option to encrypt their communications end-to-end, so that no one without the correct cryptographic keys – including the servers hosting the data – will be able to know what is being said. It will implement (n+1)sec for off-the-record multiparty encryption (think WhatsApp, Telegram or Signal apps, but for group activities of various kinds). It will implement encrypted push notifications, so that no one will see the contents except the user themselves, and the apps they installed and authorized on their device.
However, just like with other social apps today, it will not be totally anonymous. Each community will still have user ids for users, and will know who is publishing what on their own domain. They may not know the content, but they will know how many resources each user consumes, whether they’ve recently been posting, and so on.
Projects like the SAFE network aim to have one, global, completely anonymous, autonomous network where no one is able to track or stop anything from happening. To make something like that work, there needs to be a currency to pay for resources, which can be anonymously transferred between people. Qbix plans to eventually support the SAFE network as one huge “domain” though the Groups browser, and let people access “safenet websites” but its main focus will be to unite communities and let them moderate themselves. Things like the SESTA bill require communities to be close-knit enough to able to police themselves and allow people to interact in a social manner.
Thus, Qbix Platform is focused on building software at the community level (including buildings, villages and even mesh networks) and for its apps to enable actual social interaction.
Intercoin
A similar kind of thinking underlies a new project that intersects with Qbix greatly: Intercoin. Where Qbix is focused on helping communities host and manage social apps for their members, Intercoin is focused on helping communities issue and manage their own currency for their members. The project is working to produce tools of democratic governance (such as provably random polling), monetary policy (such as loans or universal basic income), and promote understanding (local consumer price index and reports on how the money moves around the community). Unlike most crypto-currencies, which run on monolithic global networks, and focus almost entirely on the peer-to-peer sending dynamics, Intercoin recognizes that money is a social phenomenon, and focuses all its energy on making it easier for communities to handle the technology, onboarding, regulations and tax implications of issuing their own currency. It aims to allow things like “airdropping” money directly to people affected by a disaster, or students in a university, or people in a poor village.
With Qbix Platform, people in a village will be able to make dinner plans with one another without needing access to the global internet. With Intercoin, they’ll be able to pay each other without needing a federal currency.
Payment platforms are best launched as a layer on top of existing social networks. WeChat, for example, was a social app which added payments, and subsequently replaced much of cash in China. Payments were recently added in Facebook Messenger, GMail, iMessage, and more. Kik and Telegram just had giant ICOs.
In the same way, Qbix Inc. will work together with Intercoin Inc. to help pave the way for communities to become more resilient and take care of their own members, and achieve our vision of Empowering People, Uniting Communities.