There's a new proposal on the block that's a collaboration between @bflanagin, @andrarchy, and @brklyn8900. You can check out the original post in the link above but I've read through it as well as all the back and forth chat in the discord so I've taken it upon myself in times like these to be one of the few "Normie Explainers" here on Steem since I think sometimes things can get a bit overly technical and hard to understand.
So what OpenSeed is looking to do is something I've actually thought was absolutely necessary in this new environment that we're building in. We have all these decentralized apps that on the one hand are working alone, but on the other are all working together. If 3Speak does really well and onboards a million users, it's not just good for 3Speak. It's good for all Steem apps because now those users have access to every Steem application, they'll also need some Steem to have enough Resource Credits to be able to transact on the blockchain which is good for every stakeholder.
So far, what I've witnessed is each project sharing the content of the blockchain of course, but there are few things where an application can be used and useful to several apps. Probably the best current example of this is Keychain dramatically improving the sign-in experience across several apps.
OpenSeed is a platform for these sorts of applications. Things that can be used across multiple Steem applications that each app developer would be able to take advantage of decreasing the amount of features they have to develop from the ground up and creating a unified experience across the Steem Network.
The flagship example being developed is off-chain messaging with OpenLink.
If you've been using Steem for any amount of time, you probably feel the void of messaging in Steem applications. We all use Discord or Telegram to fill that void now, but of course, a fluid user experience for a social application should have messaging and it should just work. Users coming from outside of this space don't know and don't care about the technical hurdles blockchain developers are facing when developing these applications. As a developer you may have just come up with a solution that has world changing implications, but if it can't be presented to an end user in a way that is easy to understand and interact with it won't matter.
From what I've read OpenSeed is looking to tackle problems like these and provide solutions that work in this environment. These would be "Layer Two" solutions. ie communicating with the blockchain, but not directly storing the data on the blockchain. Again, I think this is sorely needed because in order to compete with centralized alternatives we'll need to implement features that don't work well with directly writing to the blockchain. For some context, this is how Steem Engine tokens work, and why they can have additional functionality.
Other ideas being floated around are Paywalls. So being able to restrict access to a post unless some author provided condition is met. ie Patreon experience. Again, huge, total game changer if we could get that rolling here on Steem, especially in a way that worked across applications.
So that's my summary, if I got anything wrong or anyone with more info wants to add or correct anything, feel free. Check out the proposal and support it if you feel like this would add value to Steem(it would). I've already supported it with my witness proxy @theusersparty which I haven't talked about much lately, but it's something I made a while back that is all about supporting projects or witnesses that are committed to improving the user experience here on Steem(the witnesses it's supporting have changed since this post). This is the exact type of project that I think we should be supporting because if you haven't noticed yet. I'm very much concerned about UX on Steem.
https://steempeak.com/steem/@midlet/what-is-ux-and-why-it-s-the-1-problem-holding-steem-back
So check it out and leave some feedback! See you all in the next post.