Lots to say here about open versus closed-source practice and building for agency, but I’ll put most of that in a standalone post and focus instead on a prospective business play that hasn’t been considered yet:
I would happily pay $100/yr for an atmospheric version of Dex, a relationships manager for both professional and personal use. Sifa is well on its way there already.
Many of us here have hundreds or even thousands of contacts from just the open social web circles alone.
We thought about baking such a thing into Roomy (or rather its predecessor Weird), but I think Roomy would rather just interop with a dedicated app.
The personal CRM (constituents relationship manager) sets the stage for the longer term play of making a community CRM, which existed for a while in the form of Orbit but got aquired:
- Community CRM: Why Regular CRMs Arenât a Fit For Community Growth - Orbit
- The future of community is distributed - Orbit
- Orbit Model
- Introducing Orbit's new Discourse integration - Orbit
For example, when I’m viewing someone’s profile on sifa.id (whether it’s via the index or through my own list of connection) I’d like to see a log of our mutual interactions across the atmosphere, i.e. when we’ve commented on each other’s posts/items.
Doing the Dex-thing well has only been possible as of very recently, since permissioned-data is now far enough along that preliminary versions of it are being implemented.
I’d want to pay for such an app because it’s going to be holding on to an increasing amount of sensitive data for me (imported emails and other such private conversation transcripts or meta-data of past exchanges), and if the app isn’t getting paid to take care of my data then it’ll increasingly be incentivised to do other things with my data to sustain itself.
That’s also why code transparency would mean a lot to me in such an app, because I want (my code-literate friends) to see exactly how the app treats the data its ingesting. Of course the source code alone isn’t a perfect guarantee of fair play, but it’s a very useful trust signal.
Long term, the ideal such contacts app would actually be local-first, which Tilly is one example of. That makes source code availability all the more important.