I'm 75, building an OSS Virtual Protest Protocol for digital activism
Details
- External ID
- 46923337
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I'm 75, building an OSS Virtual Protest Protocol for digital activism
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Feb. 7, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 11
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.5707547169811321
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hi HN,I’m a 75-year-old former fishmonger from Japan, currently working on compensation claims for victims of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Witnessing social divisions and bureaucratic limitations firsthand, I realized we need a new way for people to express their will without being “disposable.”To address this, I designed the Virtual Protest Protocol (VPP) ? an open-source framework for large-scale, 2D avatar-based digital demonstrations.Key Features:Beyond Yes/No: Adds an "Observe" option for the silent majorityEconomic Sustainability: Funds global activism through U.S. commercial operations and avatar creator royaltiesAI Moderation: LLMs maintain civil discourse in real-timePrivacy First: Minimal data retention ? only anonymous attributes, no personal IDs after the eventI shared this with the Open Technology Fund (OTF) and received positive feedback. Now, I’m looking for software engineers, designers, and OSS collaborators to help implement this as a robust project. I am not seeking personal gain; my goal is to leave this infrastructure for the next generation.Links:GitHub: https://github.com/voice-of-japan/Virtual-Protest-Protocol/b...Project Site: https://voice-of-japan.netTechnical Notes:Scalable 2D Rendering: 3?4 static frames per avatar, looped for movementCell-Based Grid System: Manages thousands of avatars efficiently, instantiates new cells as participation growsLow Barrier to Entry: Accessible on low-spec smartphones and low-bandwidth environmentsWe are looking for collaborators with expertise in:Backend/Real-Time Architecture: Node.js, Go, etc.Frontend/Canvas Rendering: Handling thousands of avatarsAI Moderation / LLM IntegrationOSS Governance & Project ManagementIf you’re interested, have technical advice, or want to join the build, please check the GitHub link and reach out. Your feedback and contribution can help make this infrastructure real and sustainable.
Enrichment
- Theme
- niche social and community platforms
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Workflow automation
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- protocol for digital activism
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A basic web platform for collective petitioning or digital voting can be vibe-coded, but building a robust, sybil-resistant, privacy-preserving protest protocol requires specialized cryptographic engineering.
What it would actually take: Building an authentic digital protest protocol requires decentralized identity (DIDs), zero-knowledge proofs (e.g., Semaphore or Circom circuits) for anonymous yet authentic verification, and a distributed consensus or append-only ledger backend. The hard challenge is preventing bot manipulation and sybil attacks without compromising the physical safety or privacy of protestors. This requires deep expertise in cryptography, distributed systems, and threat modeling.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: change.org
Concerns raised: Sybil resistance without heavy KYC verification, Whether technical complexity is justified versus simpler protest tools, Sustainability model relying on donations for NPO implementations
Feature requests: Lightweight sybil resistance for 2D avatar protocol, Better visualization of silent majority/unspoken public will
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 14 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #8 of 15 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 53 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Dengen Shrine · hn · 2026-02-05 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- vrchat-avatar-acceptance-workflow · github · 2026-09-21 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.35
- AVTR-1 Real-Time Open Weights Model · ph · 2026-05-26 · 197 upvotes · similarity 0.33
- My Tizen multiplayer drawing game flopped, but then hit 100M drawings · hn · 2025-12-16 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- Learn from 30 historical figures, open source, nonprofit, self-hosted · hn · 2026-06-09 · 49 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- An old school forum on an open protocol · hn · 2026-09-30 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.32
- LemonSlice · hn · 2026-01-27 · 133 upvotes · similarity 0.32
Other launches for this product
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a workflow automation tool for Real estate yet.