It has been a while since I last shared one of my projects here, and this time I’d like to tell you about something I’ve been working on for several months: Monoverse Community Edition.
Monoverse comes from the IRC world, which I’ve been involved with and managing for many years, but the idea behind it is a little broader.
Over the years, the Internet has become increasingly concentrated around a handful of large platforms. Our identities, our communities, our conversations, and often even the relationships between people end up living inside services we don’t control.
I’m still very attached to what I like to call the Open Internet: an Internet also made of small servers, open protocols, independently hosted software, and communities that can have a home of their own without necessarily depending on a large centralized platform.
That is, in many ways, the same philosophy that has always made IRC interesting to me.
Monoverse is an attempt to bring that philosophy to the modern web.
It is an open-source, self-hosted framework that allows a community to build its web presence around its IRC channel: profiles, short community posts we call Pings, articles, media, widgets for web radios, GitHub projects, and other features that can be enabled depending on the kind of community running it.
It is not meant to become another centralized social network where IRC communities are moved into yet another platform. Quite the opposite: the software is installed by the community, and the community stays in its own home.
And it was precisely while thinking this way that Dogecoin became part of the project.
One of the rules I gave myself while developing Monoverse is very simple:
If we don’t need to possess a user’s sensitive data, I would rather not possess it at all.
This applies to identity — which can be delegated through OAuth to the IRC network instead of creating yet another database of passwords — and, in my opinion, it should apply even more strongly when cryptocurrencies are involved.
Monoverse therefore is not, and does not want to become, a wallet. It does not store seed phrases, it does not store private keys, and it does not hold users’ Dogecoin.
A user can associate their Dogecoin address with their profile. When they want to make a transaction, the actual wallet interaction happens through MyDoge, a self-custodial wallet/browser extension.
What interests me is the meeting of two concepts that, in my opinion, fit extremely well together:
a self-hosted community and a self-custodial wallet.
The community owns its space.
The user owns their Dogecoin.
The server simply connects the two without ever needing to become the custodian of anyone’s funds.
This allows us to experiment with DOGE tipping as an actual social feature of the community: leaving a few Dogecoin for an interesting Ping, thanking someone who helped you, supporting a contributor, a channel, or the community itself.
Small, voluntary transactions between people — which is probably still one of the uses of Dogecoin that feels most natural to me.
I wasn’t interested in adding a “crypto” section to Monoverse just because it looks cool. I wanted to explore whether Dogecoin could become a small and natural part of interactions between people, without sacrificing decentralization, self-custody, or control over your own infrastructure.
Monoverse Community Edition has just entered public beta and is open source. There is still quite a lot to build, and some of these ideas are deliberately experimental.
That’s exactly why I thought this would be a good place to talk about it again. This community understands Dogecoin better than most, and I’m particularly interested in hearing what you think about the self-hosted community + self-custodial wallet approach.
Monoverse: https://monoverse.org
GitHub: SimosNap/monoverse
