[Top Builder 2024]: CCNS

[Sebastix]

🏗️ Top Builder 2024 Application Form to track progress through Round 1 - 3 ~ Currently in Round 1

📝 Instructions

1. Only complete this form if you have been chosen for Top Builder, by PlebLab.
2. Provide detailed information to assist the judges in evaluating your project.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 The Team

• Team Name: CCNS
• Number of Founders: 1
• Team Background Sebastian is a creative and fullstack Drupal / webdeveloper who's building websites and web applications since 1999.
• Bitcoin & Lightning Involvement Sebastian got into Bitcoin/Lightning in 2020. By the end of 22 I discovered Nostr while I was very active in the fediverse during the peaks of the Twitter Migration. Since then Nostr is my favorite ecosystem around social networking as it's also quite easy for me as a webdeveloper to build stuff with it.
• Origin Story CCNS (Community Curated Nostr Stuff) is based on CCHS (https://cchs.social). A platform which I worked out on the end '22 with Drupal. When Sebastian got his first car (Honda Civic) he was very active on fora meeting other Honda enthousiasts and sharing technical knowledge around maintaining, tuning and improving Honda's (Sebastian's Honda Civic is still street-legal but a fully build trackcar for competition like Time Attack). Those online communites disappeared since the rise of BigTech socials. The valuable stuff we shared among has been replaced by a high attention / unhealthy consume-only apps.

Early 2023 I discovered stacker.news which really resonates with me how you can share knowledge around specific topics and curate them with sats (zaps). Inspired by SN, I've build CCHS where the curation work with votes instead of sats.

Since the introduction of territories on SN, the activity in the Nostr territory has dropped significant. For quite some time this space was one of my favorite places to learn and discuss things about Nostr. Now this kind of discovery, learning and discussing is scattered around on Nostr itself.

💡 The Idea

• Project Overview: CCNS stands for Community Curated Nostr Stuff. CCNS is a Nostr-focused community platform centered around link aggregation. Anyone with Nostr keys is able to post links and discussions and curate them with zaps containing a user defined number of sats.
• Website: https://ccns.sebastix.dev
• GitHub: https://github.com/Sebastix/CCNS
• Project Stage: Ideation into a proof of concept
• Supplementary Materials: -- https://sebastix.nl/blog/nostr-integration-for-cchs-social-drupal-cms/ -- https://sebastix.nl/blog/why-social-networks-should-be-based-on-commons/

📚 Additional Information

• Additional Links/Info: Sebastian is the maintainer of nostr-php and some Nostr contributed modules for Drupal. He submitted a proposal for an OpenSats grant for further development of these components. More info on this proposal: https://www.notion.so/sebastix/OpenSats-application-for-Nostr-helper-library-for-PHP-8fb6bd7ac4214fbaaa397b8671170160?pvs=4 More on how Drupal could adopt Nostr: https://sebastix.nl/blog/how-could-drupal-adopt-nostr/

📌 Submission Type

• [x] Initial Project Creation

🚀 Current Project Progress

• Progress Made Project is initialized by making a hard-fork of CCHS and replaced all the configurations for CCNS. The current state of the platform is live on https://ccns.sebastix.dev.
• Challenges Faced Finding the time to integrate a Nostr authentication layer within Drupal with this project
• Future Roadmap of what's next See https://github.com/users/Sebastix/projects/2 and https://github.com/Sebastix/CCNS?tab=readme-ov-file#roadmap

⏳ Round 1 Milestone

• Keep in mind that completion will need to be by February 10th, 2024.
• [x] Integrate Nostr (with NDK) for user authentication coupled with the Drupal user management system
• [x] Post links as a authenticated Nostr user
• [x] Crosspost link or note to Nostr (event kind 1 or other new kind)

📝 Submission Complete

• All required information has been provided above.

📅 Top Builder Program Structure

Registration Opens: Monday, December 18, 2023

• Application: Interested teams apply for Top Builder.
• Selection: Teams will be chosen based on their application. See FAQ for details.

Round 1: January 13 - February 10, 2024

• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops start, available live and online.
• Chat Access: Selected teams join the PlebLab internal chat.
• Mentorship: Begins for teams.
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their first-round milestones.

Round 2: February 10 - 24, 2024

• Team Reduction: PlebLab cuts half of the Top Builder teams. (Only half continued in Round 2.)
• Project Milestones: Teams are set and judged on their second-round milestones.
• Workshops: PlebLab weekly workshops continue.
• Mentorship: Continues.

Round 3: Starting February 24, 2024

• Team Reduction: PlebLab narrows down to 6 Top Builder teams. (All will be pitching in Austin.)
• Final Milestones: Teams set final project milestones for the last round.
• Preparation: Teams prepare their pitch in front of judges. Final teams are contacted to come to Austin for Startup Day.

Final Round at Startup Day: March 14, 2024

• Preparation: Teams work on their final pitches at PlebLab.
• Presentations: Final teams present before judges on Startup Day.
• Deliberation: Judges decide during a happy hour.
• Announcement: The winner of Top Builder is announced at Austin BitDevs.
• Celebration: After-party for Top Builder.

[Sebastix]

Progress done last week:

• Integrated NDK library with a JavaScript global store (singleton) view code
  • Created a Nostr contributed module for Drupal with a first dev-release: https://www.drupal.org/project/nostr_dev_kit so others can reuse this in their Drupal project
• Logging in with your Nostr account works when you're using a browser extension (NIP-07) view code
• Started to work on an endpoint where a Drupal user entity is created when a Nostr key-pair is successfully authenticated view code

Demo site: https://ccns.sebastix.dev

Coming week I expect to do not much as I'm on holiday with my family :)

I will continue to work on the Nostr authentication (with NDK) + Drupal user integration.

[Sebastix]

Demo video of how the Nostr login works at this moment: https://shares.sebastix.dev/Wt3B2U3n.mp4

[Sebastix]

It has been more than 2 weeks ago I shared an update. Things are very busy on my side as most of my attention and time goes to client-work, the family (the little ones are not quite fit at the moment while they had chicken pox) and staying fit myself (cycling).

I’m trying to catch up with all the sessions provided by PlebLab as much as possible, but I’m not able to engage live as they mostly happen late in the evening for me (UTC+1).

🛠️ The progress I’ve made this week

• A lot of styling updates, things are starting to look proper
• Optimized the login flow (NIP-07) with NDK
• When logged in, you can post links with a title, url and an optional description
• You can crosspost these link as a short text note to Nostr (there is a crosspost checkbox on the Create Link form)
• Added a neat 404 placeholder with some artwork from NoGood https://ccns.sebastix.dev/404-not-found-nogood-splash
• Added a placeholder how the discussion section with comments could look like, example: https://ccns.sebastix.dev/node/35
• Created a CCNS Nostr account npub12pj5g0370uz3f49flpz8scs85p8s9c7l6ueutjhkyc3jnggrlafsmmljva
• Set internet identifier (NIP-05) for the CCNS account with this Nostr contrib module for Drupal: https://www.drupal.org/project/nostr_id_nip05
• Created a Telegram group with some powerusers which are testing CCNS https://t.me/ccns_community

Some shots how Drupal is managing the content:

⚡ Ambitious milestone for round 2

If CCNS has the privilege to continue in the TopBuilder contest, this will be the next goal to accomplish.

• Integrate zaps with Nostr (NIP-57)
  • Only links which are crossposted to Nostr (short text notes) can be zapped
  • Sats are being sent directly to the author of the posted entities (links)
  • A small fee (a percentage of the total zap amount) will be sent to CCNS
    • Figure out how we can split a zap up

Feel free to test things out at https://ccns.sebastix.dev/ 🚀 and provide any feedback!

Looking forward to Saturday to see who’s going through and see all the stuff everyone has build! 🫂