Hello people!
Discussions.app has now open sourced their code base at: https://github.com/xia256/discussions3. They exclusively use the #TLOS blockchain as the source of truth and where actions on Discussions are batch recorded via the "discussionsx" contract. While actions on Discussions are immutably recorded to the chain, with the current software it is not possible to run the code yourself and independently use Discussions on a pure localhost environment. However, the team want to stress that this is a goal we're committed to as shown by our history of older versions of our free open source software having this feature. When Discussions crosses a threshold of 1000 active posters/day over a one month average, they will consider this functionality high priority. They don't want to implement this functionality so late that they may fall victim themselves to the way social media often sells out on their values but the team also don't want to waste time implementing it so early that it hinders their development resources and creates technical overhead that will slow them down.

Open Source is just the beginning. With this milestone now crossed, the next major focus for development outside of the obvious bug fixes is improving the user experience of someone visiting the site for the first time and greatly improving the usability, accessibility and functionality of communities.

Their focus is shifting to on-boarding more users and creating a better user experience. They will focus their development effort into refinement by improving reliability particularly on mobile, creating a landing page that will guide users into discussions more seamlessly while encouraging them to log in, and provide better ways to access and enhance communities. They will publish a more in depth roadmap that will cover some of the features we have teased and discuss things like incentives, rewards, and integrations into other software ecosystems.

As stated above the process to make the site unstoppable is not complete, though they get a step closer with this new public repository. Thank you to all the "bughunters" and people adding their voice to help make the platform better. Discussions appreciate you! Please feel free to open issues, submit code and provide feedback. Or let them know here that they have issues that need attention. Team will formalize a process to reward contributors once we make the code able to run a local instance but for now know that they have set aside funds to reward those that help. They are always in need of iOS debugging so look for a follow up guide that explains an easy way for mac users to help hunt down the sources of errors.

Sign up: https://discussions.app/