The need for an ecosystem “front-page”
Despite the existence of several options like Talisman, Nova, SubWallet’s ecosystem exploration page or even the Substrate “projects” page, none of them are seen as the “default” place to find projects.
The major reason is the lack of visibility for an end-user.
Substrate website is visited only by relatively advanced engineers/devs looking to write a pallet/build a chains, etc. - definitely not something an average non-technical user would care to find.
What an average user looking to get a pulse of the ecosystem does (they have 3 second attention spans):
- Visits Polkadot landing page
- Notices “Ecosystem” dropdown menu
- Struggles to find anything that resembles an “Ecosystem” or “Projects” page
- Concludes Polkadot is dead
Project-specific explore pages on the other hand suffer from lack of traffic for 2 reasons:
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Due to the lack of an official ecosystem page these projects struggle for visibility to an large extent themselves
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Their explore pages are over-shadowed by the project’s main offering in the case of wallets
Due to these reasons, we need an “officially” endorsed community app store.
Decentralizing marketing collaterals
By officially, I don’t mean that this is something Parity should be responsible for.
Instead, I refer to what Gavin penned down in the Fellowship Manifesto under the “Problem Factors in the decentralization of Commercial Networks” and “Power of the Default” sections.
Wherein a single legal entity controls key collaterals for the network, including the landing page and social media accounts with the community having little to no say in proposing changes to the same.
Questions I have
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Given we have OpenGov for treasury funding and runtime upgrades now, could we build a system to vote for landing page changes and social media posts?
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What might be the critical blockers for building something like this?
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While this discussion is on-going, is there a way to get dotappstore added to the “Ecosystem” dropdown menu on the polkadot.network page?