Console XYZ: Is It a Discord Slayer?

Hi, hope you are having a great week so far. The weekend is almost at hand, and with that free time, so you can relax a little, recharge your batteries, and engage in activities that you don’t get to do during the week.

If you are into Bitcoin or Stacks, you probably spend a good deal of your time over on X.com, a.k .a. Twitter. I’m sorry, I just can’t call it “X”. It doesn’t roll off the tongue naturally. I wish Elon just kept the name, damn it. But this brings me to the bigger point about social media in general.

Elon owns Twitter, and he can name it whatever the hell that he wants, right? The users have no say in what the website is called and how it runs. There has been a lot of heated debate about Elon and how he is running his company these days. Since he bought the company, he has been more flexible with the people he allowed on his platform.

One of his most notable acts as CEO was to allow former president Donald Trump back on the platform. This would have been unthinkable only a few short years ago with the prior owners because, you know, Orange Man is bad and all that. In addition to allowing “fringe” personalities back on the platform, he has been far more permissive about the type of content being shared. Under the previous owners of Twitter, censorship of certain political views was very pervasive, widespread, and expected.

Elon, purporting to be a supporter of free speech, has been much more lax and tolerant of more colorful points of view, to put it mildly. This decision has jeopardized X’s future as many of the largest companies in the United States are not advertising on X. The lifeblood of any social media company is ad revenue; without it, companies will go broke and die.

This is why Elon, in a recent interview, told Bog Iger, the president of Disney, to “go fuck himself” because he sees these corporations not advertising as a form of financial terrorism. If the goal is to run a profitable business with advertising, telling one of the biggest companies in the world to fuck off is probably not a good idea, but I get why he did.

I don’t think that X will go bankrupt anytime soon, but the fact that any moment X can do dark and everyone loses their content and follower base is dangerous to me. Why as Bitcoiners and Stacks enjooyers, are we are still using a centralized service to communicate with each other? I really don’t get it. I guess because it has been around a long time and works relatively well, people don’t see a need to make the switch to more decentralized options.

You don’t know when you will need a decentralized way to communicate until it’s too late. I always say it’s better to have and not need versus need and not have. Bitcoin has decentralized finance; we need to decentralize communication. We have Nostr and Mastodon, which are great options to use. I want to bring your attention to another decentralized social media space contender. Console is a web3 dapp that bills itself as a Discord alternative and a place where you can build your own community while retaining privacy and your own data.

As an avid believer in privacy and a user-owned internet experience, I found Console to be a compelling Dapp to explore. I don’t know about you, but I am tired of having my data harvested and monetized for the benefit of others. We don’t have to submit to this any longer, and I urge anyone wanting to take action to do so. The more people that decide to leave big tech platforms the less power they will have over society. Let’s get into how to navigate around the app, shall we :)

Home Page

When you go to console.XYZ, you will be greeted by this inviting, colorful page that highlights the benefits of using their app. The website is very clean and polished; it looks like a typical social media site. I’m not sure if that's what they are going for, but it certainly won’t turn anyone away.

Click on the download Console page to get you where you need to go next. When you click on the black button, you will be taken to a screen where you can choose how to interact with the Console app. Right now, you have the option to download it for iOS and Android or use it on your desktop computer. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to be available for mobile as, typically, web3 applications are on the bleeding edge of tech and usually only available on desktop.

I will use a desktop computer to interact with Console for this article.

Click on the black box in the web box to launch that app. When you click on the box, you will be led to a screen that looks like this. Here, it will give you a few different ways to log in. You can sign in via traditional email, Ethereum wallets such as Meta Mask, or my favorite Bitcoin wallets, Leather and Xverse.

First Glance

Once you are logged in, you will be greeted with a pretty minimalist page, which I like because it’s not cluttered, and you are not firehosed with a ton of posts, unlike Twitter. It allows you to get your bearings about you and look around. You will notice 3 tabs on the left side of the screen: communities, discover, and direct message. I will go over the first two as direct message is pretty much self-explanatory.

Let's start by taking a look at the Discover page as this is how you will find communities to join. Here is what you will see when you click on the button. You will see various communities that you can join. Right now, they mostly have an art/ordinals focus right now. As more people learn about Console, look for more communities to spring up.

I like the fact that you can pick and choose which communities you want to engage with. If you don’t like the communities that have been created so far, you can go ahead and start your own with a few clicks. I even made mine own if you want to check it out at https://app.console.xyz/c/stacksenjooyers

Having the ability to make your own community and hang out with like-minded people is very refreshing, something that we all need as early adopters of Bitcoin. We need that place where we don’t feel like we are the weird ones for believing that Bitcoin will change the world for the better. We can also collaborate

What makes Console special is that we own our data and can rest easy knowing that every keystroke and mouse click isn’t being logged and sold to the highest bidder.

Create Your Own Community

Here is what it looks like inside one of these community pages. As you can see, it has a very Discordian feel to it, so it should be easy to navigate for people familiar with how Discord works. Just like with Discord, you can create different channels within the community.

You can also add events and pages to help act as a central hub of information for your community. Take a look at how the Bitcoin Unleashed conferenced used Console.

Pages

As you can see, everything is super clean and easy to navigate.

Overall Impression

Overall I think Console did a great job building this app and has a very promoising future. As more people find out about the power and the privacy benefits of web3, Console will become increasingly popular and more widely used. Go ahead and give it a try and then tell your friends to join. The best way to get your power back is to take it back. It is within us to make the world that we want to see in the world.

If you need help getting started with a new wallet or learning more about Stacks or Bitcoin in general, don’t hesitate to reach out! I am happy to help!

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