Abstract

The Lunar DAO deserves a governance discussion platform that operates at the same standards that Lunar has always sought to deliver. The Discourse.org platform cannot meet that standard. Therefore, I am proposing that we 1) use the Circle.so platform instead, and 2) modify our bylaws to remove mentions of specific technical platforms.

Motivation

The DAO needs a place to discuss and manage the proposal process. The experience of doing so should not make you want to gouge out your eyeballs. The technical team has no interest in maintaining platforms that are not in our core competency. Accomplishing the above objectives should require as little time as humanly possible.

Rationale

The community platform was codified into the Lunar DAO LIPP without having gone through any of the Analysis, Fitness, or Complexity review processes required by the LIPP. It was chosen simply because that’s what the Apecoin DAO (plus a few others) use for their governance communication.

Having spent time with the platform, the Lunar Foundation has found it to be lacking in several critical areas:

• It’s ugly. While this may appear to be a subjective criterion, Lunar has prided itself on having the best visual design in crypto. Providing a consistent brand experience is important to our process, and the extensive visual changes that would be required to meet our branding standards will be expensive to deliver.
• It’s clunky. Discourse harkens back to the days of phpBB. It has an extensive number of settings, with no apparent organization for those settings beyond basic categories. An example of this is below.
• It’s poorly documented. They use their own platform, which was designed for discussions, as a documentation system. This is arguably a terrible user experience. An example of this is below:
  • The experience we can provide to you is only as good as the experience they provide to us. It’s bad enough that it’s hard to use, but it’s even harder to understand how to set it up, and that’s a recipe for problems.
  • It’s poorly supported. After picking the basic plan for a trial, we discovered that we’d need a more advanced plan to be able to enable Web3 logins. After waiting the weekend for a response from their support team, we were told upgrading trial accounts was “too difficult” and asked us to start over with a new trial on a higher plan.
  • For $3600 a year for their mid-range plan, and even more for their Enterprise plan, the value delivered does not justify the cost.
  • It’s on an incompatible tech stack. If you don’t like their hosting service, you are welcome to install and maintain it yourself. However, doing so means you are completely responsible for hardening the server against attacks, applying runtime, OS, and application patches, and dealing with any problems that come up due to bad accidents, bad data, failed upgrades, etc.

We would have to contract out to do that maintenance work, as it is not in our primary wheelhouse, which would cost thousands more than using a standard SaaS product. There is no financial justification for going down that route.

Available Options

Commonwealth

Pros

• Designed for DAOs
• On- and off-chain voting
• Basic discussion forums
• Sign in with Web3

Cons

• Too basic, not enough features
• No paid plans = no guaranteed technical support
• Doesn’t support BNB Chain

Discord

Pros

• Community we already use
• Wouldn’t further fragment discussions

Cons

• Can’t sign in with Web3
• Haven’t been given access to their new Forums channels yet

Mighty Networks

Pros

• Beautiful, with easy customization via CSS
• Easy to manage
• Events and live streams (for DAO discussions and AMAs)
• iOS and Android apps with Push notifications
• Same monthly price as Discourse
• Designed for SaaS companies, so better support
• Has capability to create “Courses” + paid subscriptions, so it could also run the Lunar Academy

Cons

• Can’t sign in with Web3 / Lunar Accounts
• No APIs or Webhooks for integrations

Circle

Pros

• Beautiful, with easy customization via CSS
• Easy to manage
• Integrates with Lunar Accounts
• Events and live streams (for DAO discussions and AMAs)
• iOS app with push notifications
• Has APIs & Webhooks for Snapshot & Lunar Platform integrations
• Designed for SaaS companies, so better support
• Has capability to create “Courses” + paid subscriptions, so it could also run the Lunar Academy

Cons

• $60 more per month than Discourse

Proposed Changes

• Remove mentions of specific technical platforms from our founding documents. The DAO and Foundation should be able to change platforms through simple votes without requiring an amendment to the constitutional bylaws.
• Implement Circle for our governance community at governance.lunar.io.

Steps to Implement

• Create Circle account
• Configure domain & branding
• Configure discussion Spaces
• Install “Sign In with Ethereum” into our Auth0 tenant and configure Circle Single Sign-On
• Add LNR balance checking to the sign-in process and augment claims token with proper roles based on the results of that check
• Investigate deeper integrations with the Lunar platform

Timeline

This change should be implemented at the team’s earliest possible convenience and is estimated to take approximately 60 hours of work to complete.

Associated Costs

Circle: $4,320 / year when paid annually. ($468 savings off the monthly plan) Lunar Account integration: $8,000 - estimated one-time cost Auth0: Costs accounted for in Lunar platform operation budget