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In an Outreach Workgroup conversation on Feb 2, 2023, the conversation turned to strategy for community growth, and I advocated - not for the first time - a more grassroots model. Historically Magma was built around business to business relationships driven like business development in a company, I said, and that flowed from the project's origin's as a Facebook corporate initiative. I advocated for a more grassroots model, looking for organic growth.

Other workgroup members debated whether such a model makes sense for a technology like Magma. It has high barriers to entry no matter what. A hobbyist is unlikely to be able to surmount those barriers. Moreover, the value proposition is mostly relevant only to businesses. (If I mistate this position, I welcome improvements!)

In this document I'll make the case that these positions are only opposed in ways that are superficial.

Magma Development is a Club

The researcher Nadia Eghbal has suggested a method of classifying open source projects along two axes:

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Low-hanging fruit for NFTs as a whole is fixing the issues Jonty pointed out in his epic March 17, 2021, tweet thread (https://twitter.com/jonty/status/1372163423446917122). These issues are not new features or use cases, but are blockers for new features. Fixing these issues will increase trust in NFTs and help grow sales.

Quote:

The NFT token you bought either points to a URL on the internet, or an IPFS hash. In most circumstances it references an IPFS gateway on the internet run by the startup you bought the NFT from. Oh, and that URL is not the media. That URL is a JSON metadata file

Principles:

• NFTs should be durable
  • Their lifetime must not be limited to the company managing the sale
  • They must not change after purchase, because then the changer can invalidate the contract. Portions that are dynamic must be cleanly marked and communicated. The terms of the sale must restrict the seller from modifying any other facet.
• NFTs should be complete

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Metrics Model: DEI Success

Why You Should Care

As a community manager on a project that wants to increase the number of contributors, I want to know where to focus my efforts to optimize diversity.

Metrics in the Metrics Model

• [Metric Title Here](link to metric here)
• explanation of relevance

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Metrics Model: New Contributor Funnel

Why You Should Care

As a community manager on a project that wants to increase the number of contributors, I want to know where new contributors are dropping out. I need:

• To know how I am doing as a whole
• To track how well I am doing at each stage
• To identify the most impactful places to improve

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Name of Metrics Model

Why You Should Care

Metrics in the Metrics Model

• Title of Metric 1
  • explain relationship of metric to use case.
• Title of Metric 2
  • explain relationship of metric to use case.

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Artists now spend significantly more time touring than they did in the pre-Napster days (estimates here vary) and command close to 35% more per ticket on an inflation-adjusted basis. As a result, the US concert industry has nearly tripled since 1999 (when recorded music sales peaked).

Yet, what’s typically overlooked by this narrative is that the vast majority of this growth – 83% to be exact – has gone to non-Top 100 touring artists. In 2000, the Top 100 tours (which included ‘NSYNC, Metallica and Snoop Dogg & Dr. Dre) collected nearly 90% of annual concert revenues. Today, that share has fallen to only 44%. Furthermore, the Top 100 tours have faced stagnant revenues for close to a decade, with both ticket prices and sales largely flat:

So in all, the pains and changes over the past 15 years have been unevenly distributed.

The most popular artists have seen their primary income stream, recorded music sales, collapse by more than 70% in inflation-adjusted terms since 2000 (~$14B), while their conc

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http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

The cult of growth denies the idea that you can build anything useful or helpful unless you're prepared to bring it to so-called "Internet scale". There's no point in opening a lemonade stand unless you're prepared to take on PepsiCo.

I always thought that things should go the other way. Once you remove the barriers of distance, there's room for all sorts of crazy niche products to find a little market online. People can eke out a living that would not be possible in the physical world. Venture capital has its place, as a useful way to fund long-shot projects, but not everything fits in that mold.

The cult of growth has led us to a sterile, centralized web.

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Internet of Things products rely on hardware sensors. These are little devices that monitor things like room temperature, heart rate, compass reading, etc. Sensors need to be cheap and plentiful. Low prices mean ultra-low profit margins.

So how do you make money in the sensor business?

1. Only allow access from a front end you control, and charge for the front end.
2. Don't bother trying, let suckers eat the tiny margin.
3. Give away the sensor and own the data center and/or UI.

Those are the consensus as far as I can tell, anyway. But I don't know if I believe this is all you can do. So here are my contrarian answers:

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When I'm on an open wifi network, I use an SSH tunnel to encrypt my traffic. Here's my script:

#!/bin/bash

ssh -D 9999 user@my-ssh-host.com "

echo '
****
Establishing ssh tunnel...