A16z just invested in Towns, by the maker of Houseparty & Meerkat

An experienced founder makes an important pivot to the Creator Economy.

Hey Guys,

I’m a somewhat sophisticated futurist when it comes to the Creator Economy, I’m always trying to be aware of how “Web3” might intersect with our lives as creators in the future. So this really catches my attention.

I actually thought Meerkat and especially Houseparty were pretty innovative for their time.

But does Ben Rubin know something about “decentralization” we don’t know?

Sriram Krishnan had this to say recently.

According to TechCrunch, Rubin is currently running Here Not There Labs — “a team of web3 creators dropping projects as we go.” Brian Meek, a longtime former Microsoft employee who worked on Skype’s mobile app, serves as the company’s co-founder and CTO.

The pain point of building communities for Creators around their niches is really bad and it’s actually important for our next evolution of what social media could become. So what is this Towns project?

Towns, a protocol and a web-based chat app designed to facilitate self-owned, self-governed online communities.

Some crytpo analyst see this as a more web3 enthusiast type product or app, since there’s also a crypto component, so Towns will likely initially appeal much more to enthusiasts in that community than the average app store-goer like his past projects. I hope it doesn’t take that approach and realizes it needs to have one foot in the real world instead, time will tell.

So is this Nextdoor meets Discord or is it something else?

Towns certainly looks like a Discord-clone.

Towns, a group chat protocol and app designed for online communities to build better hometowns on the internet. Towns allows a community’s members to truly own their town squares— and communicate freely—with a fully decentralized, end-to-end encrypted chat protocol owned by the people.

Towns empowers communities to create programmable, self-governed gathering spaces to communicate. Any group can use Towns to assemble and chat freely in a space designed to their needs— without ever having to worry that some organization will change the rules, profit off their activity, or take away their rights.

I think towns will actually be an NFT platform. A16z being involved tends to support my thesis there.

The idea of decentralized local communities isn’t exactly new.

Ben, Brian, and founding engineer Pat Fives have designed Towns for online communities to build better hometowns on the internet by allowing members to self-moderate and govern private spaces powered by a fully decentralized, end-to-end encrypted, and user-owned group chat protocol. But hometowns? What do they even mean.

Like Subreddits or digital twin like communities for real places?

I think they are using “Town” purely as a metaphor, so as a niche creator if that’s the case, I’m paying attention. They say:

“Own Your Town

Towns gives you the building blocks to create your ideal community. Ownership of each Town lives on-chain, so they can be transferred, sold, or even held by another smart contract like a DAO or a multi sig, giving you complete control to delegate in the best interest of your community.”

This sounds like a technology someone like Roblox might one day acquire.

And the reason I say this is the kind of language BEn and his other co-founders are using:

Make it Yours

Towns is a playground for creativity. Programmable smart contracts let you control settings like administration, reputation, privacy, and roles. Any community can build new clients or APIs on the Towns Protocol and keep complete control and customization.

Build New Support Models

Towns unlocks entirely new support models for your community. Community owners can create unique experiences such as selling access keys to specific channels, rewarding members for their contributions, or allowing users to trade NFTs directly in the chat—the possibilities are endless.

A playground, creativity? The idea of having more control over your own subreddit that could have aspects of VR/AR in the future and Web3 integrations is quite appealing. Reddit and other platforms are forever messing with how much control you actually have in a LinkedIn Group or even a Discord for that matter.

If you are a creator I think Geneva offers some of the best capabilities, but I have my doubts if it’s actually catching on. Is building our own metaphorical Town in our Creator niche maybe a bit more symbolic?

Don’t forget a16z is a major investor in Substack.

It’s also all in that crypto like lingo of DAOs and so forth:

Towns has three key components:

1. Towns Protocol

   1. Composable Smart Contracts

      Towns is an Ethereum-based system of smart contracts that puts you in control of your online space. The contracts are extensible, composable, and upgradeable, enabling communities to write their own rules for moderation, access, and monetization.

   2. Decentralized Network

      The Towns network is an end-to-end encrypted near real-time communication system governed by the Towns smart contracts and powered by a decentralized, distributed proof-of-stake network of nodes.

2. appTowns

   The Towns app takes all the technical things the protocol implements and makes them available in an open-source, end-to-end encrypted delightful chat experience. The experience ties together user identity and Town ownership through smart contracts representing access, moderation, privacy, and reputation. Tight integration with the web3 ecosystem directly in-app allows for new opportunities for users to interact with their communities in ways that weren’t previously possible. Everything from participating in DAO governance to on-chain game interactions to trading NFTs can occur directly in a community's Town where the communication is already happening. While this will be the first Towns app, it will be one of many as anyone can build clients against the Towns protocol to fit their specific needs.

3. daoTowns

   Towns will be governed and stewarded by the Towns DAO, a group dedicated to supporting the growth and development of the protocol. The DAO makes important decisions for the platform, such as voting on the core development roadmap, technical upgrades, and managing the treasury. The DAO will represent key stakeholder groups in the Towns ecosystem, like users, node operators, space owners, and core contributors.

I Don’t see anything wrong with this, and there you go, they couldn’t even help themselves, they mentioned the all important three letters: NFTs, haha and I’m not at all surprised. Trading NFTs? Hey hey wait a minute!

I want to be able to earn revenue via NFTs in my Town bro.

Seeing that Mirror.xyz never went anywhere I’ve steered clear of Web3 like products. But maybe as a Creator enthusiast I will indeed check this out.

Venture Capital Perspective

Here Not There Labs has picked up a $25.5 million Series A round from a16z Crypto, which joins its existing backers Benchmark and Framework Ventures.

Their website is pretty annoying if I do say so myself.

Am I going to be trading my soul of Ads with NFTs that swap around? Web2 was built around the idea of connecting people, and companies like Twitter and Facebook, now Meta, built global empires around this idea. But the connectivity they offered came with a hefty price as users were commoditized to sell ads. Towns, a new project by Here Not There Labs, aims to change that. We've heard a lot of things like this before, in many different incarnations. I am skeptical of the ideological efforts without real products.

Substack at least is a real product for Creators.

But Substack significantly lacks a Discord like experience within its platform. No I do not think chat within their app counts.

Sure I want to build a community that spans my interests on which my multiple Newsletters are based, but that tool has yet to manifest. It needs to offer a new experience.

If Spotify thinks NFTs could unlock content, that’s good enough for me! I want NFTs to be gateways to new experiences.

But based on Ethereum? Here we go again. The Towns protocol will offer users an Ethereum-based smart contracts system (think miniature programs that live on and are executed through the blockchain) and end-to-end encrypted chat.

There are so many of these types of experiments and they are necessary. But I really don’t want own any Ether or Bitcoin ever again.