Owner-to-Owner Messaging

Purpose: To let visitors or land owners send messages to the owner of a specific plot of land

Description: It will be important for land owners to easily communicate with other land owners on demand, without having to go through some kind of central authority.

There are quite a few reasons why you might want to send a direct message to another land owner. Some examples include:

To ask the owner of a barren plot of land if they want to sell it
To express concern to a neighbor that their new high-rise building has blocked your view of the central park
To ask a neighbor if they want to participate in an upcoming "street fair" event
To express appreciation for the wonderful, beautiful, fun creations the owner has presented

In fact, owner-to-owner messaging will be essential if Decentraland is to be self-governing.

This might need to be a core feature of the Decentraland platform, but it won't be trivial to implement. The feature probably needs to support most of the usual messaging capabilities, like tracking replies in a thread, messaging more than one person at a time, preventing spam and abuse, and so on.

Tie-in to Identity System

It will also tie in with the user identity system. I assume the identity of the user who owns a plot of land will not be made public by default. So the messaging interface would let you send a message to the anonymous land owner, who could then provide more identity information if they wanted to.

User Interface

The client-side user interface could take different forms. Some examples:

From an overhead map view, you could select a plot of land and "Send Message to Owner."
From a generic client interface (menu or HUD) you could input the coordinates for a plot of land and "Send Message to Owner."
Each plot of Land could have a standard 3D object (like a mailbox, kiosk or tablet) near a designated main entrance or in a default corner. When you are walking around Decentraland, you could access this object to see some general public information about the land, "Send Message to Owner," Like/Love/Flag-for-Abuse, or perform other land-specific functions.

Of course there would need to be a general messaging interface as well, with an inbox, the ability to read messages and threads, the ability to compose new messages, and so on. In general, these kinds of features are not well-suited to VR environments, so this might need to happen outside any VR or game-style UI.

Expressing Appreciation and Other Common Messages

Some types of messages will be very common, like wanting to express appreciation for land content, or inquiring whether the land is for sale. To reduce message overload, these types of messages could be handled in other ways.

For example, to express appreciation some simple Like/Love/Disapprove/Flag-for-Abuse buttons could be used, and visitors could select one much like Facebook users do in order to Like a post.

To support simple "Is this for sale?" inquiries, a standard message template could be used, or maybe a dedicated for-sale-inquiry feature could be implemented.

Even so, there will always be unforeseen messages that people want to send, so it makes sense to have an easy-to-use, hard-to-abuse messaging interface of some kind.

Rob (rdixon)

decentraland / proposals