Is it appropriate for Dfinity official to take a stand?

General DFINITY
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Recently, our team discovered some improper contents under Dfinity official forum post. Therefore, as one of many start up projects on IC, we condemn such harmful behavior and its consequences for breaking the balance of ic ecosystem, such differentiation would let to many hard working projects feeling discouraged and contempt.

In the identity & authentication section, the Dfinity official purposely displayed Plug and ICNS and made it looks like it’s the only wallet and domain name service on IC. But in fact, IC Naming was the first project to create .ICP suffix. Our testnet has launched since last December with open sourced code since day 1. Plug and ICNS are only a small part of IC ecosystem. Many other great projects on IC don’t have the privilege to be seen so easily. (i.e. Ratels Wallet, Earth Wallet, Infinity Wallet, ICPBOX, I C wallet, Stoic Wallet,Astrox me , the domain name project includes IC Naming ). Currently, Dfinity official’s behavior are very damaging for the IC ecosystem and misleading for other users, which undermines the working ethics of other ic developers.

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Another thing that’s worth noting is that we found that in the DEX example of the official document, DIP20 was officially listed as the example code. In fact, there are many great community token standards rather than DIP 20 (i.e. DFT, IS20, DRC20 and EXT), but they never gets mentioned. At present, the token standard is still advancing and open for discussion. However, the Dfinity official directly displayed DIP20 as the official example code in the official document, which would probably led the community into false belief that the DIP20 has been selected as the official standard, which is irresponsible to the community.

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Dfinity official actively posted content about Plug and ICNS in the forum, its a serious violation of the core value of decentralization . Without a fair and healthy competing environment. That would be futile for us developers to work this hard. Because ultimately, all the effort we put in will not be able to compete with the power that Dfinity official has to promote certain project. Moreover, If Plug wallet and ICNS can be favored by Dfinity official today. Will there be more similar situations in the future for Dao, NFT and gamefi? On the other hand, what Dfinity official are doing right now it’s also misleading for users, because they will greatly affected by official’s behavior and lost their interests to find other higher quality projects in the community. As such, we would wonder if that’s the case, will there be a future for an ecosystem that has lost the core value of decentralization, such as fair competition and transparency?

Therefore, in the consideration of maintaining a positive environment and promoting a fair competition in the IC ecosystem:

1. We hope that the official will recognize and correct this mistake, avoid doing things that displays Dfinity official’s subjective value and tendency for any projects.

2. We hope that the Dfinity official will make more efforts to establish an open and transparent ecosystem that carry the core value of decentralization.

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Agree with you somehow, but it seems that the development of IC naming is very slow? From the day I registered, I even cannot open the website for a long time? You may need to speed up the development?

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I am NOT a dfinity employee. However this is a public forum. It is entirely appropriate for dfinity employees to post their personal opinions and biases on the forums.

In certain cases, the dfinity employees do make disclaimers that their views are their own. In certain cases, an employee(mostly it is @diegop , i think) who does represent Dfinity foundations view.

From your description so far, it seems like a innocuous review of certain wallet / certain naming service/ standards. Can you please provide specific example of the post ( & the context) that you are refering to?

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2nd whiny post in 10 minutes. this has to be a record.

tl;dr:

50% of the people - reeeeee! dfinity should take a stand support a standard and move this thing lesssgoooooo

dfinity publishes an example

50% of the people - reeeeee! not that position! i want my useless service advertised, not the other one!

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Here → more inclusivity :laughing:

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Instead of linking a catalog or ecosystem showcase, the SDK page redirects to a blog owned by a single entity. @ais there are no co-incidences

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The whole point of crypto is to realize a more inclusive and trustless platform. You are pushing us to trust an entity through the SDK page @ais @diegop

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It is in the official documents. You can click the link to view it.

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This is an adaptation of a Medium article written by the folks at Plug wallet.

This is the 2nd line of the first article. To me it reads like an intro to core concepts on the IC, like principals, accountIDs, the difference between them, and what each choice enables and avoids.

The second is a sample, advertised as such, and as far as I can see it integrates ICP with a mock tocken based on DIP20. What exactly is the complaint here?

we condemn such harmful behavior

“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t” comes to mind.

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Having gone through the links provided, this is NOT a dfinity issue. They are linking some content and some samples. Again i am NOT a dfinity employee.

@Tyler Have you tried to approach Dfinity with alternate content? They are fairly approachable and reasonable. I am sure that they would take reasonable suggestions, reasonably. They are also struggling with time as they solve and implement some of the very tough problems in crypto.

Why don’t we (@Tyler and i) come back with some reasonable content with competing products and see if they would put it on the sdk page? We can shoot for the content in 7 days and submit to @diegop ?

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Hi @Tyler (and all!)

First, we just want to say thanks so much for the comments. They are much appreciated, and we’re really happy that people are paying attention to the new docs :slight_smile:

We totally agree that it’s super important to have an open and transparent system, to promote a diverse set of community members, and to work towards decentralization together.
The dev portal revamp is a first step to engaging more community members. We really made a conscious effort to move in the direction of documenting the IC with developers and community in mind. Adding various reference to other projects/proposals (other than DFINITY) was a first step to invite other active contributors and community members to add to the portal. We are opening the portal repo for public contributions, and we’d be more than happy to see edits, additions, or suggestions from whoever is willing to give them!

Clearly we need more inputs and showcasing. The portal is still very much a work in progress, we’re still building it out, and I mean it when I say that these feedbacks are appreciated - it gives us direction for where we should build out more, to create a place for you and the rest of the community to contribute, and to form a hub where we can all grow together.

Our first thought as a response here was to say “create a PR, or create an Issue in the repo”, but immediately comes the question of how contributions, suggestions, and pull requests would be managed. Saying ‘make a PR’ does not addess the fact that we don’t yet have a systematic way to judge PRs - is replacing one standard for another a good addition to the docs? Likely not. But is creating an addition sample, or page for another standard overall better? Likely so.

Perhaps this is exactly that moment where we need to bring folks together to discuss a good ecosystem-promoting strategy for the docs. What do you think? As always, we’re open to suggestion!

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I work closely with @ais and the question of how to balance the competing needs of having docs which are user-friendly AND promote the ecosystem often rear its ugly head.

Let me lay down some things we believe:

  1. We believe docs should help users and promote ecosystem (indeed, see how the IC wiki mentions multiple providers whenever possible: Tutorials for acquiring, managing, and staking ICP - Internet Computer Wiki)

  2. We believe people should feel free to make PRs to the docs (we also believe we have NOT communicated this properly).

  3. We believe that having a PR that replaces all mentions of “plug” with another wallet in a zero-sum way is NOT what we want to see.

Lastly…

  1. We believe that we need the community to create good documentation standards for judging PRs and evolving docs further.

@ais and my proposal

We propose we discuss async in the forum, but also organize 1-2 synchronous sessions on zoom with different wallet leaders. The goal would be to settle on some patterns in the docs for non-zero-sum promotion of dapps (Identity and wallets is just one example, we will see similar things with DEXs and others). @ais and I believe strongly that we need to work with community at the next iteration of patterns for the docs.

If interested, please DM me, but i will be creating a new post soon and reaching out to folks

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I should explain here the intent:

  1. Intent was to create a community page with many options
  2. In the meantime, we just posted one link (with more to come so we can spread the love and promote many players)
  3. This community page has been “almost ready” for weeks now but keeps being priority 2 under many things.
  4. Today, we decided to cut our losses and will remove the link entirely so we do not give false impression
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@Tyler honest question: I am curious why no one just thought of emailing, DMing me or even just saying “hey folks, what about X?” Was your belief that we would only listen if it’s a strongly-worded long post on dev forum?

If the answer is…

a. “We did message you all, and no one listened!”
b. “We did not think anybody would listen without kicking some sand”
c. “We notice only people who create such long threads get attention”
d. “Honestly I was too upset to do anything else”
e. Something else?

…then I want to know that. I can accept any option, I just want to know how to iterate.

To be clear: I am NOT saying you did anything wrong… you would be doing me a solid if you could explain your rationale so we can improve the tenor and tone of dialogue?

I assume that we (DFINITY) made you feel you needed to write a formally written complaint.

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I don’t know that it is Dfinity’s role to spotlight anyone in particular. In fact, the more the ecosystem can provide for this, the more decentralized it will be… maybe one path would be to present a new open source tech news feed Dfinity could “endorse” to get things going, this way they can focus on their work and “we can on ours”. Maybe one geared towards the typical user experience, as opposed to developer focused as this forum is.

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Allow me to explain some of the intent (which I do not want to pretend we have full mastery of… we are still navigating through the nuance @inviscidpixels):

The docs in questions are meant to be helpful and practical for people. So sometimes it is practical to give users concrete examples, such as when users want to know “How do I store an NFT?” the answer may be:

“Here is a list of known wallets that can hold NFTs…”

Indeed, that is what we do in the wiki: ICP custody options - Internet Computer Wiki

Same thing when people ask:

  • Where are the people discussing developer related questions? (links to discord, dev forum, etc… not run by DFINITY)
  • Where are some explorers I can see?

This is further combined with the idea that DFINITY does want to promote its players (in a fair way) as much as it can to help them get traction and to signal to users places where their problems may be answered.

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Absolutely agree.
In addition, I want to say one thing.
The organization Psychedelic has developed everything in IC ecosystem.
Psychedelic have so many projects(Plug/Dank/Cap/dab/ICNS/Jelly/sonic/sly/metasport-ball),include wallet/Defi/protocol/infrastructure/game and so on.
Do they have enough energy to do every product well?
And now some products are directly displayed in the official documents, so what about other projects?
Web3 need more open, and need cooperation.

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I have been working on the promotion and development of the token standard (GitHub - Deland-Labs/fungible-token-standard: Dfinity's fungible token standard. Any PRs and comments are welcome,collaborate with us to build this standard) for a long time, but I am disappointed that the official Dfinity team only shows DIP20 on the official documentation. Maybe Psychedelic was made by Dfinity officials themselves?

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We need an official standard anyway, otherwise, things going to be so incredibly confusing. There’s plenty of token standards on Ethereum, but ERC-20 is the most popular. Can you imagine how confusing that would be if that wasn’t established? I’m not saying screw the other token standards, it’s just… confusing.

And disclaimer, I’m not a developer - I’m a user.

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A shout-out to everyone interested in IC token standards:

Please read this doc from the working group and leave your comments! They are listening.