The Interledger Community 🌱: Matters

Matters — Grant Report #3

Guo Liu — Fri, 25 Jun 2021 19:26:39 +0000

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Project Update

The last phase of our project was promoting Matters' Web Monetization integration.

For content creators, the biggest obstacle of adoption of Web Monetization is the lack of content consumers that are paying with Web Monetization, which is especially so among Chinese speaking communities.

It is also a chicken-and-egg problem since the obstacle for content consumers to adopt Web Monetization is the lack of content that supports Web Monetization. Therefore we designed a bounty program to incentives creators to setup payment pointers as the start of a positive feedback loop.

Progress on objectives

We implemented a mechanism of distributing a total of $2000 fund to content creators who has setup payment pointers, based on the total reading time of the content they create.

When setting up the rule of the bounty program, we limit the eligibility to articles published between May 7th and May 20th to guarantee fairness of the fund distribution. In the end 37 articles was rewarded with our fund, with highest rewarded article receiving $194.

However, as long as the creator has enabled payment pointer, all of her/his work will have payment pointer embedded, which corresponds to a large number of content. Up to now 2,635 articles have payment pointers enabled, and the number is still increasing.

Comparing to our original plan, there is one goal we did not realize. In order to encourage our users to familiarize with Web Monetization, we planned to distribute the fund with Web Monetization directly, so the users can experience withdrawing funds to bank account. After research we found out that the only payment client available, Coil, does not support donation of custom amount, and it is non-trivial to implement at the application level. Therefore we ended up distributing the fund via Matters wallet.

Key activities

We first implement a mechanism to determine the distribution of the fund. The mechanism consists of recording read time of articles from user that has logged in to Matters, and calculated the final fund in proportion to the time been read.

After implementing the mechanism, we created an account and a tag for the promotion, and published an article explaining Web Monetization and our bounty program, as well as encourage users to explain and .

Lastly, we distributed the fund according to the calculated result, and published an article publicizing the final result. We then kept curation content related to the explanation Web Monetization.

Communications and marketing

The major goal of this phase is communication and marketing. The bounty program we designed turned about to be a powerful marketing strategy that enabled Web Monetization for nearly 3k articles.

As a user generated content platform, we not only communicated about Web Monetization by publishing content ourselves, but also by encourage users to write about Web Monetization. Users on Matters have written about the mechanisms, mental model and applications of Web Monetization, as well as novel ideas on general content monetization shemes.

Many of these articles are tagged with #WebMonetizationMatters. The articles were written in Chinese, but English reader can utilize our auto translation functions to read the English translation.

What’s next?

We will continue to promote and curate content related to Web Monetization, in order to encourage adoption of the standard, especially on content consumer end.

What community support would benefit your project?

As mentioned above, donation to content creator is a common use case. If donation of customized amount is available, either by Coil or other community tools, Web Monetization as a standard will be much more useful in connecting creators and consumers financially.

Matters — Grant Report #2

Guo Liu — Thu, 18 Mar 2021 01:01:24 +0000

Project Update

We have just launched our Web Monetization to the general public! A user now can simply setup her/his payment pointer in the wallet page, and it will appear on all her/his articles, whether accessing from matters.news website or from IPFS.

Matters users can find the entry point of Web Monetization setup in their wallet page, a portal to review their transactions.

An user can simply enter her or his payment pointer in the popup modal to complete the setup. The modal also includes a short explainer with the resources an user need to understand Web Monetization and Interledger Protocol.

Progress on objectives

We have reached our goal in providing our users a Web Monetization integration that is easy to setup: they simply go to their wallet page, enter their payment pointer, and Web Monetization will be enabled for all their articles on both matters.news and IPFS. The wallet page has been the portal for users to review their transactions in fiat currency and LikeCoin, and now is also where they manage their payment pointer.

Another objective we have is to simplify the process of publishing HTML with Web Monetization standards to IPFS, in the form of an open source package. This objective is also met with this TypeScript repository on GitHub. It takes a HTML string, payment pointer and other arguments, and outputs a buffer object of the HTML package including all referenced assets, which can be directly added to IPFS. This package can be installed from npm.

Key activities

We started from user research and product design, to determine where is the best place to integrate and introduce Web Monetization for our users, and what is the best way to explain the related concepts to our users.

We then implement the design in our system, with all the code open sourced. You can find the logic related to matters.news frontend in this repository, logic related to formatting for IPFS in this repository, and logic related to storing and reading payment pointers on the server side in this repository.

Communications and marketing

Since we just launched this integration, we are communicating and testing with a group of selective users to see if there is any bug and how the users are adapting to new technologies and new mindsets.

In our product we included a short explainer in both English and Chinese to point users to the resources they need in order to understand Web Monetization and Interledger Protocol. However this is not enough for most non-technical users, and we will have to rely on the next step to promote this functionality.

What’s next?

For the next step, we will be writing articles to the community to explain the concepts behind Web Monetization, and how can they start using it. In order to motivate users’ adoption and to showcase the convenience of Web Monetization, we will allocate a part of the grant to reward authors who have setup their payment pointers, prioritizing the content that explains and demonstrate Web Monetization and other technologies suitable for a decentralized web.

What community support would benefit your project?

The biggest support we can have is more payment and wallet providers, and in different forms, including SDK integration etc. For now the only available payment provider is Coil, meaning all donations has to come through Coil. This is not a bad thing, but if more providers and methods of integrations are available, it will be easier to convince users to make the switch.

Another support that would benefit our project is better support of paid content, for example content behind paywalls. For most professional writers, living on donations is not realistic. With the rise of platforms such as Substack, Medium and Patreon, readers are gradually getting used to paid content. If Web Monetization can have a good support for paid content, it will benefits independent writers, and therefore benefits projects like ours who are serving independent writers.

Relevant links/resources (optional)

More on our thinking and design of Web Monetization at Matters can be found in our Report 1
More on the background of Matters can be found in our article for MozFest
Our HTML formatter for IPFS which supports Web Monetization can be found here

Web Monetization on IPFS — Matters

Guo Liu — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 23:17:27 +0000

Project overview

Matters is a decentralized, cryptocurrency-driven platform for creative work and public discussion. Matters aims at reconstructing the content value ecosystem around public issues and knowledge production: build a supportive and friendly community, protect the copyright of creative works, allow users to discover quality content through humane ways, and enable creators and participants to acquire sustainable revenues.

All works published on Matters (excluding comments) are stored in the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to realize the distributed storage of the contents, completing the first step of returning data to the creators. Creators can then receive donations through LikeCoin or fiat money. And now, thanks to Grant for the Web, creators can setup their payment pointer, receive donations from any clients that can access IPFS and in any currency Interledger Protocol supports.

Although many functionalities still requires a centralized server, Matters community is already operating in a decentralized fashion at the organization level: activities are initiated and organized by users using community public funds, rules and guidelines are discussed and revised collectively, and punishments on bad behaviors are proposed and judged by all users. Many of the rules operating on Matters are still formed and enforced in a traditional way, but with more and more experiments become successful, we will develop them in the form of smart contract to lock them open.

Project team

Matters was founded by a group of award-winning journalists, editors, and veteran engineers. Our team is fully remote, and our members are from China, Taiwan and United States.

In October 2019, Matters and LikeChain joined forces to introduce LikeCoin, a cryptocurrency based on writers' creativity, into Matters to give reasonable revenue back to authors.

What we are doing

For the past 4 months, we integrated Web Monetization standard into our system, and developed the English version of Matters website with the ability to translate any articles to the user’s local language. This allow us to serve users with different monetization needs, as well as English speaking communities.

Another exciting feature is the launch of Circle this week, which enables creators to start subscription services and form spaces for more in-depth communication. In the past the structures and spaces on Matters are entirely public, similar to the textual of a buzzy plaza. With circles, creators can create and organize invitation-only rooms, semi-public fan clubs and anything in between, while generating revenues from their supporters.

Started from writers and journalists, the most popular form of creation on Matters is article. However we have been expanding to painters, illustrators, photographers and podcasters. We are in the process of further generalizing our open-source infrastructure and developing clients that specialized in particular mediums such as audio.

What community support would benefit your project?

To reach a decentralized and humane content creation ecosystem, we still have a long way to go. This is where both challenges and excitements come from, since many different efforts are helpful in reaching this goal.

One area is the wider and more diverse availability of Web Monetization providers, wallets and integrations. The diversity is needed not only in the number of provider entities and forms of integration, but also in the cultures and languages of user communities. Standards such as Web Monetization are essencial parts of a generation of decentralized cyber identities and are indispensable for keeping the world connected in a time of increasing nationalism, localism and censorships. The flexibility of use cases and diversity of players are preconditions for the adoption of such standards.

Another area is the communication and discussion of standards friendly to decentralized network. Decentralization has far reaching implications beyond the connection between content creators and audiences, but has few direct benefits on near term financial gain. It is therefore important to explain to non-technical creators about the rights and power they can regain from a decentralized system. One effective way could be projects using Web Monetization partner up and explain different aspect of the benefits, and showcase different examples of its usages.

We know that changes has to come from ourselves, so we are actively working on both areas. In additional to being a service provider that simplify the usage of these great standards, we will also invite other Grant for the Web grantees to join force with us in promoting Web Monetization and other decentralization-ready standards. Please stay tuned for our developments!

Link Round Up!

Matters website: Matters website will select English or Chinese based on your browser setting. Most of the articles are in Chinese, but if you are an English user, you can click the translation button under each article title to see the English version.
About Matters: more information and media coverages about us.
Grant for the Web report 1: more information on how are we integrating and utilizing Web Monetization standard

Highlight other projects

LikeCoin is a blockchain project that Matters works closely with to achieve an open and decentralized content ecosystem. They are also a grantee of Grant for the Web. Check them out if you are interested!

Matters — Grant Report #1

Guo Liu — Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:40:46 +0000

What is Matters?

Matters is a socially connected publication platform that gives ownership back to creators by utilizing Web3 technologies and services. It is a space where creators meeting their audiences and each other through sincere discussions, and where authors freely express their experiences and opinions without worrying about censorship and surveillance.

At Matters, we explore how the creation and consumption of content, as well as the emergence of civil discourses and communities, can be decentralized and self-sustained. For example, we use IPFS to distributed censorship-resilient content, integrate Like button to bring revenue to creators, and experimented with user organizations to self-govern and self-regulate.

Although Matters supports English, it is currently mainly serving Chinese speakers and most of the content are in Chinese. However if your browser setting is in English, there is a translation button on every article that can translate the content to English.

How is Matters integrating Web Monetization?

Web Monetization and the support from Grant for Web allows us to overcome existing problems and bring the decentralization to a new level. Financial transaction between reader and author has been a pain in the past. Readers and authors locate in different counties, and most of them not tech-savvy. Fiat currency is limited by political boundaries, and cryptocurrencies are not yet user friendly and intuitive enough. We integrated payment services for both fiat currency and LikeCoin, but both have their limitations, and none of them could be integrated into decentralized storage such as IPFS easily.

With Web Monetization, we are now able to give the power to define the accepted currency back to the users. Interledger protocol enables freedom on both paying and receiving end, and open doors to various optimizations on user interaction. For the past 4 months, we studied how Web Monetization can be integrated into our product, interviewed with users to find a way to merge it seamlessly into their workflow, designed the suitable user interaction and user interface, and implemented Web Monetization for all users. We also started encouraging users with Web Monetization experiences to write about their experiences and understanding to create discussions and anticipations. The final feature is currently enabled in test environment, and will be enabled on production environment in mid-March.

With this feature, an user can enter a payment pointer in her or his account setting, which will be included in all her or his work to accept donations. The content an user created is not locked on a single platform, and this means that the payment pointer is accessible wherever their content is been read. This includes matters.news website, Liker Land app, IPFS public gateways and other form of clients that support IPFS. Currently the only major payment provider for Web Monetization is Coil, so the donation is limited to Coil extension or Puma Browser. However with the growth of Web Monetization ecosystem, content on Matters will be ready for payment.

A short explanation of Web Monetization and Interledger Protocol: “In order to increase the source of income for creators, Matters introduces Interledger Protocol, which enables the payer and the payee to conduct transactions in different currencies. You can configure the wallet address through Uphold, GateHub and other services to get income from Coil, which can be used on both the Matters website and the IPFS network.”

What is the next step?

At the moment we included a short description on our product about what payment pointer is and how to set it up. When enabling it in our production environment, we will also publish a longer article that offers explanation in depth.

This initial step is important, since Matters is mostly serving Chinese speaking communities, and unfortunately Web Monetization is not well known yet in Chinese speaking communities. But mere explanation is not enough to drive usage and adaption. Without readers using Web Monetization for donation, it will be unrealistic to convince authors the usability of payment pointers.

Therefore the next step will be a campaign to showcase the power of Web Monetization. On the one hand, we will partner with other Grant for the Web grantees to write about Web Monetization on Matters and other social medias to increase understanding of this technology. On the other hand, we will allocate a significant part of the grant as rewards, to reward authors on Matters through Web Monetization in form of prizes. We will focus on rewarding contents that are about Web Monetization or other decentralization-friendly content, which will further raise awareness of the benefits of these new technologies. This will drive the adoption of Web Monetization among authors.

Please stay tuned for our campaigns, come earn your price, and stay for the community!