Boundless Synapse

The context

We at Boundless believe that the future of how we connect will likely be through augmented reality (AR) worlds. However, we are adamant that that ecosystem not be run only by for-profit corporations. Boundless support for-profits as they are a useful part of modern society but the profit motive is not the appropriate one for public spaces. 

Ever since the era of social media, a few corporations have had unchecked authority and centralized control over an increasingly personal and vital means of connection. 

Boundless: Synapse is a fight for a better way forward. 

The Synapse vision

Boundless Synapse asks the question, what if we could tie together our online social experiences into a single cohesive system? What if we could carry over the people we love, the items and currency we obtain, the reputation we have gained to new activities in social networks and games as often as we want? 

Boundless Synapse is method of unifying the entirety of the future of immersive applications and virtual worlds into one cohesive ecosystem designed to:

1. Preserve your rights and privacy

2. Allow you to use the same avatar and identity across the entire virtual world

3. Allow items in one world to be usable in another, and vice versa

4. Ensure that that ecosystem has no intermediary, avoiding exploitation.

Proliferation of Synapse

Our plan is to solicit volunteers from around the world to create experiences integrating Boundless Synapse from the ground up using our World Lab program. 

The first digital society

Volunteers will begin by working on a single set of integrated experiences together considered a digital society. 

This first digital society will be extremely limited in it's approach only accepting projects which fit a distinct humanity-centric ethos. Volunteers will work together to build a series of social experiences with that ethos in mind relying on Synapse to tie those experiences together.

In this first digital society, experiences will feature a diverse set of purposes as long as they help connect members of the digital society and respect the humanity-centric ethos. A strong set of values and a deep social incentive structure will be used to tie the experiences together.

Experiences will share the following across the digital society:

• Shared reputations/accolades 

• Shared over-arching community achievements

• Shared narrative elements (if relevant)

• Shared avatars 

• Shared currency

• And of course our ethos, namely: 

  • Humanity-first approach

  • High accessibility 

  • Geared toward cooperation. 

Key elements like currency and reputation systems play into the deep social incentive structure that knits the fabric of the experiences. The aim is maximum creativity and purpose diversity combined with maximum connection between users of the worlds.  

Boundless Synapse brings all those applications and games together as one cohesive experience.

Agora 

Imagine all of the aforementioned experiences together and all of their users—these together are considered a single node or digital society. Agora is the name of the first digital society and it represents one unique culture, an attempt at the concept of "society" in an online space. 

Beyond Agora

Agora represents one set of values, one way. However, the goal is for Boundless Synapse to extend beyond the first digital society to most of the world's virtual experiences allowing one’s interoperate all over the greater virtual world. 

In other words, it's critical that users of Boundless Synapse will be able to take their personal ecosystem to other groups similar to Agora and other games, virtual worlds and experiences.

Think of Boundless Synapse like a highway network, connecting key destinations within a city, but to truly succeed, it must also facilitate the movement of people and goods between different towns and cities.

Towns represent individual games and experiences that were not incubated by World Lab, but would like to interoperate with some part of Agora. Cities represent clusters of experiences like Agora which have their own interoperable assets and that simply use the Synapse social graph and technology to interoperate between their experiences. 

Incentivizing adoption

As we explained earlier, NFTs failed by pushing developers to accept interoperability without providing an incentive for them to do so. Unlike the experiences we incubate, avatars and assets will be more of a burden than a benefit for other Poleis to integrate.

Optional: Why cross-digital society incentive structures change

As demonstrated by Ready Player Me, asset usefulness at game inception is limited to that phase. Asking established experiences to integrate assets is usually a burden rather than an aid. This means that when leaving a particular city (cluster), only certain parts of your inventory will naturally interoperate with other cities as those cities may have a disincentive to allow you to interoperate.

To put it simply, if you buy a hat within the Agora digital society and travel to a different digital society, they may not support that hat and they have little incentive to support it.

To create that incentive we have a two-fold strategy.  

Agora as an example 

We believe that a superior means of social organization can be created in an online community, even before augmented reality comes about, if all the participants are willing to embrace the concept and if intentional relationship-facilitating tools are created. 

Agora, in part, exists to be a proving ground to discover the ideal set of tools and features to create meaningful connection within such a digital society.

The goal is to tease out the secrets to real social organization in an online space and to maximize the value of that social organization through the tools we create. 

Agora is to be made a shining example of what can be done with the right environment, experiences and tools. 

These tools can be features like currency, gamification, moderation and reputation systems. As we incubate these capabilities in Agora, they will be added to Boundless Synapse allowing it to become a social organization tool kit on top of an interoperable personal ecosystem. 

To reiterate, our goal is for Boundless Synapse not only to be a personal ecosystem for individuals moving from experience to experience or city to city, but for Boundless Synapse to become a tool kit to build your own city.  

If we can discover the features and tools that connect people best and tune them toward that connection, we can create a package of tools anyone can use to duplicate the sort of social organization we create.

This is the first part of the two-fold strategy. 

How experiences consider integrating tools

To oversimplify, think of the value proposition as if you're a web developer integrating the Google or Facebook login button. It's only valuable to you inasmuch as it saves your users time to log in using that button.

Boundless Synapse intends to offer more than just the ability to login, we intend to create a suite of tools other communities can use to create meaningful connection and organization in their communities. 

The more groups that integrate Boundless Synapse, the more value it provides to those who want to plug in to its userbase. 

Phase two is to project power through numbers by having other groups adopt Boundless Synapse, so that one day our ecosystem will be the ecosystem within the greater virtual space.

Critically, phase two is the only non profit project seeking to compete with the for profit alternatives who would like to control this space.*

Synapse vs corporate alternatives

Corporations have shown that when they get into a controlling position online, they will push that system to maximum profit extraction. That in fact is the job of a for-profit company and that's perfectly reasonable. However, when it comes to tech monopolies, the potential exists for a single corporation to control and profit off an entire generation of spaces and creators. 

The potential exists for a single corporation to follow our every movement, tax our every digital transaction and even profit off all we create with little compensation. 

The Roblox model

Roblox is a successful game tool creator and distributor. Game developers create their games within the Roblox ecosystem using its engine and benefiting from its userbase. However, if you want to create within the Roblox ecosystem, you pay a massive premium.

See: "When One Creator Adds $22B in Value... and Gets <0.1% of It"

Core Creators graphic on Roblox revenue share.

Just imagine if you could benefit from the traffic of a Roblox-like community but do so outside of their ecosystem. 

• Just imagine logging in to the place where you talk with friends and family, work and live only to be followed everywhere.

• Just imagine, everything you create in that world is owned by the corporation. Everything you sell in that world is taxed by the corporation.

There's nothing wrong with corporations turning a profit, but when there is no alternative, and when that corporation is earning more than the creators in question from their creations, the potential for large-scale exploitation exists.

The Roblox model which has corporations everywhere salivating, must never be applied to the future of actual digital life and connection. 

Boundless Synapse's community toolkit is designed to allow creators everywhere to collaborate on creating a mutually beneficial system that avoids a few players controlling the future of the internet. 

How Boundless Synapse will fight for our rights

Boundless Synapse puts you in control of what data you share with those who seek to interoperate with it. Moreover, it will be useable by any experience on the condition that people's rights are protected. Synapse creates value for free on the condition that people's freedoms and rights are protected across the wider virtual world. 

Namely, those that integrate Boundless Synapse agree to: 

• Allow users to port their data through Boundless Synapse to other experiences. 

• Agree not to censure users for not revealing non-critical data when interoperating via Boundless Synapse. 

• Will provide a reasonable means of appeal to those who are banned from their platform.

• Encrypt personal voice communication between groups under five people. 

• Choose not to store sensitive political and religious data or data that can be used to target people based on their beliefs. 

Critically, if Boundless Synapse is limited to Agora, it fails, but if Agora draws in copycats willing to use our tools we gain leverage to condition the use of our tools on the freedom of their users. 

*That we know of.