Hello friends!
Tomis here with a Junto Monthly Review. We're going to do our best to provide an update like the one below, monthly, moving forward. Of course, there will periodically be other newsletters for announcements and whatnot, but we want to make sure you're hearing from us and seeing all the progress that is happening (even when it it is behind the scenes).
When reflecting on the past month in Junto Land, three words come to mind: community, clarity, and code. They all start with a C, which is an alliteration and a cheesy thing people do when they are creating section titles for a presentation, public talk, or I guess a monthly review for Junto.
We've got some renewed energy and inertia pushing us forward and many of you are to thank for it. We've raised $115K from nearly 300 individuals since late February from a combination of crypto donations, bridge loans, and new backers from our crowdfunding campaign. We are grateful to all of you who have chipped in and spread the word — this support has allowed us to keep our focus on the right things.
From that momentum and focus we've been able to launch public communities on our centralized mobile app and ship a major UX/UI update that centers on finding and engaging in public communities. The update also makes navigating the app much simpler. In the last month, we've seen the number of concurrent users and requests per second double!
Communities are being created and the larger Junto community is growing, which means we are doing a lot more support work. We've onboarded 205 new crowdfunding contributors and answered 66 support tickets (in addition to a bunch of support taking place inside the app) in the last month.
And, there's the Holochain developer community. We have begun talks with Kizuna, Sacred Capital, and Hylo to see where it makes sense to be collaborating. We are also excited about the possibility of jumping into some work with Commons Engine based around developing and amplifying the common threads of inspiration that exist throughout the various Holochain projects in the ecosystem.
Help us keep the momentum going strong. We need to raise an additional $385K in order to expand our dev team — which will help us develop our Holochain app much faster — and otherwise be solvent for the rest of 2021. Share the crowdfunding campaign and reach out if you are interested in making a larger donation or bridge loan.
We realized in the summer of 2019 that we should move forward with developing a centralized mobile app while Holochain was working on necessary core development changes. We've made a lot of progress on our centralized app and are really happy with the way it has shaped up, but it wasn't until recently when we were able to jump back into Holochain development that we remembered how crucial the distributed technology (and larger vision of Holochain) is for tapping into the source of our inspiration.
We've learned a lot designing and developing the centralized application and we are grateful for the entire process and we are really pumped to be at a place where we can start to see some of these p2p app visions become real. In the last four weeks, the dev team has been able to build out our Holochain API and 90% of the front-end for our first Holochain application (see a little preview down below). We're also integrating AD4M Core into the back-end of our distributed application to give it incredible potential for interoperability. AD4M is a new agent-centric meta-framework for front-end development being developed by Holochain contributor Nicolas Luck and our very own Joshua Parkin. We expect to begin internal testing of our Holochain application's first iteration in a few weeks.
We've written a lot of code! If you want to see the specific improvements we've made to the centralized app or any of the new repos for our Holochain application, check out the lists below.
Launched public communities + directory to discover new groups!
Implemented sorting public communities by size
Created validation on communities' handle
Fixed the member list performance issue
Communities search now returns community-specific image
Limited number of communities that one person can create
Completely new UX/UI for app (navigation, filtering channels, creating expressions)
Made significant progress on a rich text editor for long-form expression type
Implemented badges to recognize our crowdfunding contributors
Shifted to unlimited invites to private beta
Lotus icon (bottom left of navigation bar) now takes you back to the list of communities
Back button for android works properly now
Hive cache now resets properly when you log out
Register token API is called once now when a user opens the app for the first time
Fixed bug where broken links caused expression post to crash
Various small changes to relation endpoints
Performed analysis on back-end request routing to reduce request latency
Optimized overall performance and cache — the app is zippier 😎
Migrated to Flutter 2.0
Next steps include: fixing remaining bugs, ability to make existing members facilitators, push notifications for iOS, and more.
Setup core electron application run, ad4m executor, and UI
Refactor ad4m core to work in our context and not just inside perspect3ve project
Upgrade various existing DNA's to RSM
Added more functionality to ad4m
Added more ad4m languages for Holochain communication, 'Shared Perspective', sharing & creation
Starting building RDF structure for distributed stack
Built out entire UI for Holochain/Web front end
Check out the code & design mapping:
Next steps include: making app responsive on all device sizes, linking up front end with Holochain & ad4am libraries.