Forum Migration to Commonwealth Temperature Check

[pmuecke]

Aim

This proposal aims to gauge community sentiment regarding transitioning the current Discourse forums to Commonwealth and outline a possible timeline.

Background

Commonwealth combines the core functionalities of Discourse with token-gating and governance interfaces such as polling and on-chain voting. An introduction to the Commonwealth platform is available at: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
Including a comparison between the two platforms by the Commonwealth team: Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.

Several communities have transitioned from Discourse to Commonwealth, some examples are:

1INCH: Commonwealth
Gelato: Commonwealth

Other communities that use Commonwealth are Osmosis, Evmos, Stargate, Juno, and Terra.

Proposed Timeline

04/05/2023 - Start forum discussion
18/05/2023 - Start voting period of an on-chain signaling proposal
25/05/2023 - Review results from the signaling proposal
26/05/2023 - 29/05/2023 - If the proposal passes: migrate to Commonwealth

Demo

A demonstration regarding the functionality of Commonwealth is now available at: Commonwealth

Community Questions

Several questions were already asked by the community, these have been compiled here. Please leave any further questions below.

Q: If you want to log in with a validator account, it currently is not possible if you have a ledger as Secret uses a different cointype that does not have ledger support through Keplr.
A: StarShell has recently added ledger support and does support the Secret cointype. StarShell uses Keplr endpoints so it should work out of the box.

Q: Will it be possible to hide your address on the platform?
A: We are already working with SCRT Labs on a feature to not have addresses publicly viewable.

Q: Is there a main admin or owner?
A: There is no forum ‘owner’, we do have admins and moderators. Those roles are similar to Discourse and will be linked as well during the migration unless otherwise indicated.

Q: Does Commonwealth cost money?
A: No, not at the moment. The core functionality will be free forever.

[markcommonwealth]

Hey @pmuecke,

Mark here from the Commonwealth team

We’ve been in discussion with Secret Network community members and wanted to surface some questions we’ve been receiving and to address them in a public space

Q: “Is Commonwealth decentralized?”

A: We approach decentralization very seriously, we not only want to serve decentralized communities, but are actively decentralizing. We are decentralizing piece by piece. They are as follows:
Note Decentralization is usually accompanied by “trustless”, and so milestone 2 - is included in here:

1. Since 2021 / First Commit: Is the Front End Decentralized?: Yes it’s already decentralized (has been since day 1
2. Q2 2023: Is Signing Trustless?:** Snapshot style signing across posts, comments, reactions on the forum? Yes => active PRs up
   • We are integrating Session Keys so that all posts, comments, reactions on the forum will be able to be signed via your public key (some more on session keys, note, not our documentation)
3. Q3 2023 latest Q4 2023: Is the Backend / Data Decentralized ? Not yet => it will be, soon
   • Short Term: we have an open (API Key Gated) API, that anyone can pull from
   • Long Term (latest Q4 2023): The whole backend will be decentralized, meaning users can run nodes to host / validate increasing proportions of our data store over time (this should initially start to land , with the lea
4. Late 2023 / Early 2024: Is ownership / membership decentralized trustless and decentralized? → not yet but actively working towards making groups, permissions, roles live on chain!

Q: “What balances is commonwealth looking for? only staked?”

A: This is something that Community Admins are able to set directly. Similar to how Snapshot allows you to choose / change token strategies

Q: “Are the issues that people were facing (at least I faced with Osmosis) with really slow load times a thing of the past?”

A: We’ve been actively pushing out fixes to improve site speed. We’ve got 7 out of 20 eng tasks done, averaging 3/4 per week. By the end of the quarter (and probably before), you should be saying “goodbye to the loading cow” (because site speed is much faster) - This screenshot also covers our steps being taken

Q: “So what would we lose by migrating?”

A: Commonwealth enables communities to fully import their Discourse history, so communities don’t skip a beat and continue operations with little down time.

The import mechanism preserves profiles, topics, threads, comments, likes etc.

Providing a quick, seamless transition is crucial in order not to interrupt any governance or community discussions. See a recent discourse imports below!

1inch: Import date: January 12th 2023

Q: “Not doxxing addresses”

A: Currently profiles are tied to an address for gating purposes but as mentioned in the forum post, we’ve chatted with SCRT Labs on integrations here - want to make sure we’re not going against the core ethos of Secret
Generally we see a best practice of token gating Governance related topics while other topics such as support or resources remain completely open - it’s truly up to the community and their goals

Q “Does Commonwealth support email login”

A: We currently have Magic Link enabled for ETH communities however it’s something engineering is actively working on to enable for Cosmos communities

If there are any other questions please feel free to drop in the discussion and we’ll get answered!