Imagining a web3 PKM App
I've been going down the web3 rabbit hole the past few weeks. It's been crazy. Late nights reading articles about dapps, daos, smart contracts, etc.
I'm not going to go down the trail of whether web3 is all talk and hype or actually a real, evolution of the internet. To me, the big pull is community owned vs centrally owned. If web3 is a move away from massive companies owning all of our data, I'm all for it.
There's a lot to web3 to know and I'm extremely far from having any level of proficiency on the subject. I've only scratched the surface really.
But it has definitely piqued my interest. It's has me thinking about decentralization and NFTs and how they could be integrated with PKM's or productivity apps in general.
Put your thoughts about NFT's aside, I'm not talking about NFT's in the sense of CryptoPunks or an ape smoking a cigar, but rather NFT's as a means of supporting someone for doing something great. As a means of motivation.
This got me thinking about PKMs and even todo/task management apps.
I've always wanted to build my own personal todo list app. I know, like we really need another one of those. But I've wanted to build one that just had one screen with all your todo's. Not multiple lists you jump in and out of, but just one list that you can filter from the top using tags or dates.
And then I started thinking about web3. What would be the web3 way to make this app? What would be a new, unique way of doing this? What would be the web3 way of making a PKM app like Obsidian or Roam?
I thought of two features: NFT's and decentralization.
NFT's and PKM's
Let's not talk about the usefulness of NFT's right now, that's another post for another day.
To me, NFT's become interesting when you start giving them a purpose and utility.
So imagine a todo app where someone can take a project they are working on and mint that task or todo as an NFT. They place that on Opensea or any marketplace and people can now buy that todo as an NFT.
What about a PKM? Someone can spend tons of time building out their notes/graph/vault and then mint the access to that vault or maybe just a few notes. The notes themselves are not stored on the blockchain, that still seems like a tough thing to do since space is expensive and the size of the notes/documents would be quite high. But they could be stored centrally somewhere else and access given by purchase of an NFT.
Ok, so who cares? What's the point?
This is interesting to me because when you buy, let's say a task/todo, as an NFT you are now showing your support to that person. It's like you are saying, "I believe you can do this." Think about an entrepreneur working on starting their business and she puts her last todo for launching her business as an NFT and someone buys that NFT; it could give her a huge boost and give her the confidence to keep going. And you could potentially be buying a todo from someone that could be making something amazing. A smaller scale might be a student studying for finals and is struggling, but then they mint their last todo and someone buys it and sends them some encouragement. It can give you a feeling that someone really believes in you and you feel like you can keep going. Cheesy? Yeah, but it's still cool.
Buying access to someone's PKM as an NFT could help them feel like they are working on something important and help them keep writing. Can you do this through Patreon or Ghost? Sure, but minting it as an NFT makes it far more exciting and keeping a public record of everyone that buys it is kind of cool.
This may seem a little weird for sure. But this is where NFT's can become a lot more interesting down the road. Maybe the todo NFT is in the form of a jpg or pdf and the person that buys it can get exclusive updates from the person as they are working on that todo. Maybe the NFT for their vault or PKM graph is an image of their Obsidian or Roam graph.
PKM Graphs seem prime for NFT material. It's even more interesting when they give you access to that graph in some way.
Decentralization & Open Source
This one I'm still learning about but I think it can have the most potential.
I've heard a lot about how web3 allows apps to be decentralized. I love the idea of having an app not be centrally owned. I would love to make a todo app that can be forked and built upon by the community. Mastadon is a social network that has a neat take on decentralizing social media.
This reminds me of Obsidian in a way. I know Obsidian isn't decentralized necessarily, but the plugin system has made it feel like anyone can really "own" Obsidian by making it do whatever they want it to do. Roam has javascript plugins. In fact, nearly any new PKM app is having some form of plugins to allow the community to add functionality to the app.
This was not as exciting years ago when less people knew how to code and open source projects were slower in development. But now that coding is easier and far more accessible, it's quite easy for people to contribute to an app with a javascript plugin or even changing the css. Normal people can contribute, not just developers. This was Steve Jobs entire pitch for the Macintosh: get more people under the umbrella of being able to use a computer.
Gaming is doing a great job of showing what more decentralization could look like. Loot is an interesting example. Made by Dom Hofmann, the co-founder of Vine and creator of Peach (a vastly underrated app for its time), people can contribute to the game any way they want to expand it. Everyone feels more involved and the entire game feels more exciting because of it. I think this is a huge reason why Obsidian is gaining huge ground in the PKM space, everyone feels like they have a stake in it. And everyone feels like they are building the story of Obsidian.
I would love to see a todo app that runs the same way. It gets created as a dapp (decentralized app) on the Ethereum network and then anyone can contribute however they please. They can change the look, add new features, gamify it - whatever you want.
This seems to fall more under open source than decentralization, but I think they can be really exciting when combined.
Final Thoughts
I think of web3 as being similar to VR: we know it's cool, but we aren't exactly sure the best use case for it yet. I think web3 and the blockchain has more immediate utility than VR, but the comparison still seems good.
I'm still on this high of maybe getting a glimpse of what the next wave of innovation on the web will look like. Community owned and storing information on a universal ledger seems really interesting. How it will work with PKM's and other productivity apps has yet to be seen, but it's fun to think about.
Right now NFT gaming is making some insanely interesting strides and showing how web3 can be more than just a fad. I would love to see productivity apps also take advantage of this next wave.
Maybe a lot of what I said didn't make sense or was way off, I'm still trying to understand all of this. But it's really exciting. The PKM space is already insanely exciting and is becoming more accessible by the day.
I don't think it's a coincidence that PKMs are getting more popular as decentralization and web3 is getting bigger as well.
I can't wait for what's next.