community-repo/contributions/history/joystream-up-until-2021.md

Joystream - up until 2021 - Year(s) in Review

(this introduction has been written by @tomato)

Firstly, thank you to everyone in the community and Jsgenesis! I hope 2022 is great for all of you. To each and member of the community, thank you--every single one of you has bought something to the table and it has been great seeing our community develop so much, and thank you also to Jsgenesis for creating this amazing project.

I joined this project very early on and where we sit right now is so far away from the early days (when things would break a lot and proposals would always expire). The hard work and dedication of everyone involved has resulted in both a fun community and huge improvements to the way we all work together to make the DAO function. Despite our small size, what we have all managed to achieve together so far is astounding and far exceeds what many other projects have. It is a significant achievement for us all to be proud of.

If you skip the numbers and statistics for now, which all projects have, the community that has formed here is made up of such a wide variety of interesting people with a huge, varied skill set. The truly different perspectives and ideas that people have discussed show that we're well equipped to deal with the future--and having all of these people and their voices gives us significant unique value.

Amazing, exciting things are in store for this project and 2022 is going to be an amazing year for all of us. I wouldn't pick anywhere else to be.

Everything that happened up until 2021 (a lot!)

(This is the first look at the history of the platform's development and community, so it will include as many important events as possible since the project was created)

• Early platform history (2018-2020)
  • In December, 2018, Jsgenesis was launched in Norway and consisted of 4 employees based in 3 different continents. The initial announcement laid out the their goals for the project, with JSG developing the infrastructure, network and tools and the community's using these tools to develop Joystream (https://blog.joystream.org/jsgenesis/) The project's manifesto was also released at this time (https://github.com/Joystream/communications/tree/master/blog/the-joystream-manifesto)
  • Over time the Meosopotamia, Sparta, Athens, Acropolis and Rome testnets were launched (https://github.com/Joystream/joystream-landing#past-testnets)
  • A variety of incentive schemes were experimented with during this time, allowing participants to get paid directly in Monero for performing certain tasks--the testnet tokens didn't get a value until later on. The reason for these incentives was explained here: https://blog.joystream.org/pay-for-play/
• June 2019
  • On the 25th June, 2019, @nexusfin (nexusfallout) made the very first post on Joystream's forum titled "This is the first post ever for the Joystream Shit Posting Community" https://testnet.joystream.org/#/forum/threads/2?replyIdx=1 Sadly this post will be wiped in an upgrade coming soon, so make sure to go and appreciate the Mona Lisa of our forum! This is very likely to be the first ever post using a DAO's on-chain forum in history.
• June 2020
  • The community-repo was created by @bwhm (https://github.com/Joystream/community-repo/pull/1). The community-repo has since provided a valuable place for the community to contribute and manage rules and processes as well as home to various scripts and other items.
• August 2020
  • The first Joystream Community Call happened https://github.com/Joystream/community-repo/issues/13
• October 2020
  • @freakstatic developed the first script to produce tokenomics reports: https://github.com/Joystream/community-repo/pull/29 This was one of the largest contributions any user had made to the project at the time and proved critical with helping turn the council from being very unreliable into something great. It has since been developed much further, providing much deeper insight into the platform.
• Decemeber 2020
  • @l1dev launched https://joystreamstats.live/. Joystreamstats is an external stats website that shows data from the Joystream DAO in an easier way. It has proven its value in helping users to better understand the project and provide vital information for participants. It is also the first independent, community created project to be made and funded by the council's mint.
• February 2021
  • The Founding Member program launched, allowing for users to start gaining mainnet tokens through their contributions to the project.
  • Joystream had a huge, sudden number of Russian-language speakers join the community. This was the first significant growth to happen. The RU Telegram channel was formed, it has 1000 members and significant activity independent of the official Discord server helping to decentralize the project. The RU users have had a significant and profound impact, bringing some extremely valuable to the project as well as a great sense of humor.
  • The first "Joystream Meme" developed, "Beard Man" became a huge interest in the Russian Language community and generated many inspired art works (https://testnet.joystream.org/#/forum/threads/249)
  • Joystream outgrew the official Telegram channel as a result of having too many new users, resulting in an official Discord server being created. The Discord's multiple channels helped a great deal with structuring how we communication and helped to improve things.
• March, 2021
  • The Antioch network sadly broke after a runtime upgrade failed (https://blog.joystream.org/announcing-antioch/). This unfortunately meant that the network was down for a week or two, and as there was nothing to do until the network was relaunched we lost many new participants. But we also retained many strong, dedicated participants.

Statistics + Achievements