Why Seed Protocol?
The unique value prop for Seed Protocol has three main components:
Network effects for the people
The path to network effects thus far has relied on heavy capital investments -- investments that require extractive monopolies to make the risk and resources worthwhile. As permissionless peer-to-peer networks like Ethereum mature, we finally have the chance to see what network effects look like as a public good. This is what we hope to enable with Seed Protocol.
Seed is an attempt to coordinate permissionless network effects around a minimal design pattern. Because of its simplicity, anyone can publish any type of data to a Seed enabled network without modifying their existing data workflows. We think this is a necessary (perhaps even sufficient 🤞) condition for sparking a global data network that anyone can leverage to express themselves.
One could think of Seed participants as Facebook users that are not behind Facebook's API. Build your own API, or use someone else's. Build a business around it without fear of being rugged by the whims of the market or a small group of shareholders. The network effects are yours to keep and grow.
Permanence
Permanence is not just about storage of data, but also a flexibility to adapt to unknown future circumstances. Seed allows different meaning to emerge from the same pieces of data as people, culture, and perceptions change.
When trying to conceive of a way to make content last into the future, one discovers that success requires a deep humility about one's ability to predict the future. Anything we think we know now may end up being wrong. Thus, Seed makes the minimum amount of assumptions around messy concepts like authorship and sensemaking. These are left to the users of Seed to determine for their communities and for them to adapt as new needs arise.
In Seed Protocol, the querier of the data determines the meaning, not the author. This alleviates the protocol from solving verified authorship from a technical perspective.
Discoverability
One of the biggest problems that the giants of web2 solved was discoverability. They did this by creating a walled garden that they could control. Seed Protocol is a way to create a public network that anyone can publish to and anyone can query.
By default, just dumping everything into a public network doesn't solve the discoverability problem. Seed lets you have your own walled garden and then build bridges to other gardens as needed. It then adds a layer of indexing that allows you to search semantically for things in whatever way makes sense to you. No one's view of the data on Seed will be the same, but everyone can find what they're looking for.