ImmutableType: Profile Creation is Live
Fresh off winning our grant from Flow blockchain, we're introducing on-chain profiles in alpha. It's time.
They say momentum is second only to timing when building platforms, and ImmutableType is catching that momentum to pair with incredible timing to decentralize journalism.
I am excited to announce that our community members may now create their own profiles for ImmutableType on the Flow blockchain.
Why is that significant?
The novel approach to trusted information networks in the future will be…wait for it…real humans. The future of information integrity belongs to humans, not chatbots or AI agents or spam hacker networks, but humans as real and identifiable as your neighbor.
The foundation of decentralized journalism and community ownership of information integrity is based on shedding the fog of war present in news and media today. We simply don’t know WHO or WHAT is generating the ‘news’ we’re being served. There’s little incentive for that information to be reliable or in service of the audience, and, indeed, it’s often perversely generated to affect outcomes that hurt our community and personal relationships.
Therefore, humans, such as you and me, and our local reporters and newscasters, must be reliably identifiable as the source of the information. We must disintermediate algorithms and bots to have conversations we know are authentic peer-to-peer communications—no more game of telephone filtered through distant talking heads, government officials, NGOs, political parties or think tanks, anonymous social media influencers, or propaganda content farms. Humans are the solution for human relationships.
ImmutableType is dispensing with those old tricks.
We’ve created an identity system to enable people to create profiles they may individually verify and own.
By contrast, typical social media profiles are OWNED by the social media companies. They may shut down your access or regulate your distribution. Your behavioral data is their property to monetize or moderate. Anyone may anonymize a profile and obfuscate their intentions with the information they distribute. These are the tactics of the first 25 years of the 2000s. We have a better solution today.
There are fundamental differences about our profile system:
When you create a profile through ImmutableType, you own it. It’s a transferable asset. You can sell it or hand it off to your children if you choose.
Your profile is immutable. Nobody may turn it off. Your entire history will be available forever from the day you create it.
Your profile is provable. If you’re a journalist, you may PROVE you own that profile and the words you publish originate with you.
Your profile ID is numbered to indicate if you were early or late to the future of journalism. Imagine having Facebook ID number 23, instead of 2 billion and 23.
Your profile activity holds the same ownership. If your profile ‘owns’ an article, it will always own that article unless sold or transferred.
Creating a Profile on ImmutableType
It’s an easy process for a complex outcome. Once complete, you’ll have an identity on the blockchain forever, and we’ve made this simple for most users.
NOTE: ONLY USE PC OR LAPTOP FOR NOW. MOBILE IS DISABLED.
1. First, make sure you have MetaMask browser extension installed. Go to https://metamask.io/download if you do not have the extension. This is a standard Web3 wallet that lets you interact with the blockchain. It’ll look something like this once you’ve completed the setup:
2. Next, navigate to https://app.immutabletype.com/profile/create to connect MetaMask to ImmutableType to create your profile. Our landing page will look like this:
Click “Connect with MetaMask” and confirm the popup from Metamask to connect to the form. It will ask you if you want to “switch networks” to Flow blockchain. Agree to switch networks.
To prevent spam, we have a transaction filter or qualifier token requirement. DM me directly, and I’ll send you 3 FLOW tokens to bypass this registration fee. My contact info is in the footer.
Once connected, you’ll see a simple profile creation screen as follows. Fill it out and click “Create Identity Profile”. You will receive a confirmation on screen in less than 10 seconds. Let the minting process run if it exceeds 10 seconds. Confetti will appear once complete.
Note: The field to enter a URL for your profile pic is probably the most confusing step if you’re not Web3 native. Feel free to skip it if this is a challenged. We will add ‘edit’ functions fairly soon that will provide the ability to update.
5. Congratulations, you should see a screen just like this:
That’s it. You’re done. Your personal profile will be onchain and ready to engage with the features of ImmutableType as we release them.
What’s next?
Hot off the heels of our grant win last month, we’ve been building all throughout September in the Flow ReWTF community bounty program. We just increased our award by 30% by finishing in 4th place. We slaying, folks. Remember the momentum? We have it after all these years.
Now, for the entire month of October, we’re diving right into the Flow blockchain October hackathon shipping code in a global competition. People LOVE our mission to decentralize journalism, so we’re hoping for major support if we ship code. Let’s go!
The roadmap for this month is to release new connection formats via credit card payments. We get it — Web3 wallets are not intuitive, so if downloading MetaMask and learning Web3 is too steep a hill to climb to onboard to ImmutableType, never fear, we’re going to reduce that adoption friction as much as possible to onboard folks into blockchain. I’m a web2 guy, so we know we need to make this experience as simple as clicking the ‘like button’.
The most important feature for the month is to migrate our proposal system from test net to main net. This system puts the editorial decisions in the hands of the community audience members. Users with verified profiles will be able to submit news proposals for journalists to bid to take on the work of writing articles about the subjects on behalf of the community members. This is a very clean system that inverts the influence of the audience from passive consumers of media into explicit funding for news that matters to them. It’s a first-of-it’s kind system. Stay tuned to see this working in person by November.
Thank You to all the Believers
Thank you for your support over the last three years as we worked to arrive to this point. They call it grinding for a reason. Overnight success often requires a decade of work and lots of breaks.
Special thanks go out to Mayor Suarez of Miami for his leadership in establishing the Venture Miami incubator program to advance ImmutableType. It was instrumental as a catalyst.
A major ‘thank you’ goes out to all the Flow community of course. We’re truly honored to be among strong company on Flow with Disney, the NBA, the NFL and UFC. The Flow community members have been amazing.
Best,
Damon Peters
Founder, ImmutableType
Remember to DM if you want me to send Flow tokens for registration: