6 Interesting Decentralized Social Networks

Facebook, VK, Instagram... For many Internet users, these social networks have long become a way of daily communication and obtaining information. We make friends, share our opinions, and some even make money on social networks. Few people think that these giants have more advanced analogues, where you can talk, post an article, and even get money for it.

Steemit is a decentralized blockchain social network where you can get paid for publishing content in cryptocurrency. And today we will introduce you to the history and features of Steemit.

The history of Steemit

The beginning of the history of the emergence of the cryptocurrency Steem and the social network can be considered 2020. In the spring of this year, Ned Scott and Dan Larimer decided to create an analogue of a multi-user system based on blockchain technology. Scott became the financial brain of the project, having previously been a financial analyst. And Dan Larimer is the inspirer and one of the main developers. He already had extensive experience working with blockchains and cryptocurrencies, as well as the unofficial name “Godfather of Bitshares.” “Our network is like Reddit. But here you get paid to be active,” said Ned Scott. The idea was picked up by the community and after a short time the first version of Sttemit was released.

Blockchain and cryptocurrency

Blockchain will be used on the decentralized Internet to record the movement of data, register unique usernames, and even directly store data.

In addition, there are already cryptocurrency projects that should help create the DWeb. For example, Protocol Labs launched the Filecoin cryptocurrency in August 2020, which made it possible to attract investments in the project in the amount of $205 million. Filecoin should contribute to the development of the free data storage market. If a user of the decentralized Internet has free capacity, he can place the data of other users there, receiving Filecoin for this. If he needs to host his own data somewhere, he will pay for this service with cryptocurrency. All transactions are recorded on the blockchain.

In DWeb, users will have to pay more often for access to this or that information, since a business model in which the user simply views ads based on data collected about him will not work effectively on a decentralized Internet. For example, if a user wants to listen to a song that someone has recorded and posted on the DWeb, they will have to pay with cryptocurrency for the access key.

In a decentralized internet, most passwords will also disappear. Each user will have only one really long and unrecoverable password, which will work everywhere in DWeb, to connect to any applications. On the other hand, if you lose this password, you will lose access to everything.

Social blockchain

As noted above, Steemit operates on the blockchain and is managed by community members. You can register a new account either for money or absolutely free. In the first case, a small fee (about $3) is charged to the new participant. When you create a free account, you need to provide an email address and phone number. Moderation is carried out manually and takes from 7 to 14 days. Payment is required if you do not want to wait. Payment is possible using several options:

1. Blocktrades. A service that accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, STEEM and several other currencies.
2. SteemWallet.app. Own open source wallet. AnonSteem. A service that allows you to work with Bitcoin, Litecoin and STEEM.
3. SteemConnect. A separate option for those who already have an account on Steem, but want to make a payment to create an additional account. SteemNinja. Service that accepts credit cards, PayPal and Ethereum.

The decentralization of the platform allows it to remain uncensored and reward participants using cryptocurrency. This structure distinguishes Steemit from Facebook or Twitter, where the administration will never pay users. Quite the contrary: you will have to pay the network to publish some material. Special curators monitor compliance with the rules of work and publication of materials. Their responsibilities include checking the quality of texts and media files, as well as compliance with the rules of behavior and communication. The work of curators is also paid.

Decentralized social media platforms

There are also other approaches to decentralized social network experiences. Let's look at specific examples.

Peepeth

Interface of the decentralized social network Peepeth

Peepeth is another active example that uses a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain to keep a history of all activity. Interactions do not occur directly on the blockchain. They are stored off-chain, but after reaching a fixed size, they are added to Ethereum for a small fee. Veteran users can be waived after a certain threshold.

Minds

Interface of the decentralized social network Minds. Source: AlternativeTo

Minds is putting forward an attractive offer where users can earn tokens for using the platform and viewing their content. You can also optionally pay tokens to other users or use them to increase the number of views on your content. Instead of a centralized company making money from your interactions, Minds allows users to earn and control their own money.

Read on topic: How to earn cryptocurrency for viewing ads? The Brave browser has started paying users.

Inrupt

Inrupt is also worth a look, although it has the potential to be much more than just a social network. Co-founded by Sir Tim Burners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, Inrupt is focused on an open, decentralized future where everyone can create and manage their own repository of personal online data that can be used in a variety of ways. This could be, for example, a social network profile, a resume, or a simpler age verification form for websites. This new platform will allow people to control their data and make it easier to use it online.

Steemit Digital Coins

Steemit uses several types of digital coins as payment:

1. Steem coin. The main currency of the Steemit blockchain. You can earn it or buy it on a crypto exchange.
2. Steem Dollars (SBD). Stablecoin pegged to the US dollar. Until mid-2020, SBD was traded on exchanges at a 1:1 ratio. Now (after several adjustments) the token rate is approximately $0.61 per coin. SBD storage brings 10% annual income.
3. Steem Power (SP). A special influence token that gives weight to your voice on the platform. SP cannot be sold on crypto exchanges; it can be exchanged for steem coin or SBD.

Steem Power is mined using the POW algorithm. The source code of the miner is located at the link. In total, 21 users participate in SP mining:

1. 19 are chosen by general vote;
2. The owner of the most powerful rig becomes the 20th;
3. The 21st is selected from among the candidates who did not qualify in the first round of voting.

In addition to the already mentioned tokens, the platform allows you to issue your own currency – SMT (Smart Media Token). It is a built-in digital asset on the Steem blockchain that can be quickly launched to monetize online content and reward subscribers. SMTs have certain similarities to ERC-20, but they have a built-in Proof-of-Brain system and pay out using a distribution model designed specifically for those dealing in digital content.

The blockchain platform is not limited to one social network. It also runs several decentralized applications, including:

1. eSteem;
2. DTube;
3. Utopian;
4. Steem Monsters.

At the time of writing this material, Steemit has more than 1,000,000 subscribers (active accounts).

Equality between robots and people: how to build a decentralized social network of the future

04/29/2020 Guest materials

#Proof of Stake#decentralization#social networks

Concluding the series of articles on the shortcomings of (D/L)PoS algorithms, co-author of the book “Web 3.0. The present of yesterday's tomorrow" Vladimir Popov spoke about decentralized social networks (DSN) and the Internet of the future, in which it is impossible to turn off sites and limit access to information.

Today there are already several working solutions:

• Steem.
• Golos (formerly a fork of the Steem blockchain, now a Dapp on the CyberWay blockchain).
• dTube (something between “IPFS for video” and Steem for the same; the closest analogue is Livepeer, but with functionality close to stock).
• Hive is a fork of Steem that was formed due to the confrontation with Tron.
• Commun is a social network on the CyberWay blockchain.
• VIZ is a DAO for digitizing the social capital of any project, be it a YouTube channel or a Telegram bot.
• Memo is the simplest network notepad for Bitcoin Cash.

There is even a whole protocol for building social networks - ContentsProtocol.

In addition, there are services aimed at monetizing accounts in classic social networks: such as cointigo.io. There are projects in development: first of all, Voice from Block.one, which involves payment for verification and other bonuses. Or the lesser-known SteepShot, which has not yet been released in a normal version.

There is also Twister (aka decentralized Twitter), which implements the functionality of classic social networks. This should also include:

• Tinder's analogue is Legalfling.
• Wikipedia's equivalent is Everipedia.
• Bitrad.io is a service for monetizing listening to radio streams.

A separate story is VR spaces, similar in purpose to Second Life, but still based on the principles of blockchain communities. Decentraland is a bright representative.

Despite the innovations, it turns out that each of the implemented projects tries to transfer old motives and principles of architecture onto the rails of DRS (decentralized and/or distributed systems), most of which we examined in previous parts.

Space rockets and algorithms, or what keeps decentralization in its infancy

What are the disadvantages of this approach? On the one hand, there is a certain heredity (continuity), but on the other hand, we are stuck in those obvious disadvantages that are born from the crossing of decentralization and centralization. I'll try to explain the question more broadly.

DSS can be in one of the following forms:

• Dapp is a decentralized application.
• DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization.
• Blockchain.
• Multiblockchain.
• Next/different level.

Firstly, many believe that DAO is narrower in content than DeFi, but this is not so, since not only financial, but also social and other types of capital (even emotional) can be digitized.

Secondly, the difference between a Dapp and a DAO can be relative when viewed from the perspective of functionality, complexity of implementation, etc.

For example, Golos - Dapp (CyberWay); Steemit is a Dapp (Steem), but if you look at Bitcoin as a network, we see a full-fledged DAO. In this sense, everything is not as simple as it seems to neophytes who arrived on the new wave of small DAO/DeFi hype.

Everywhere there is an acceptable level of decentralization. How to achieve it in DSS?

General solutions for DSS

The more storage options, the better. Why is everyone obsessed with IPFS? Yes, the solution is effective, but is this where p2p storage ends?

Judging by the test network, Filecoin is no longer just IPFS, but something fundamentally different. The same goes for Sia, Storj and others. But this is not the last step.

Don’t forget that there are peer-to-peer file-sharing networks of previous generations: I2P, Tor and others. And the list is impressive. Finally, there are torrents: magnet links, coupled with existing solutions within DRS, provide excellent opportunities for open data storage.

This, of course, raises the question of how fast storage can be if you need to hide something from view (this is exactly what Filecoin and its analogues do). Let’s take it as a basis that solutions already exist/are being developed—that’s enough for now. Issues of bandwidth and related problems are covered in the first parts.

Secondly, the DSS should not only be massive, built on trust through cryptography, open, but also fair. No one is calling for digital communism, but at a minimum, all active and (but not or) useful members of the community should be awarded. The risk of seizing power through ownership/storage of shares (staking), validation, voting should be minimized.

I’ll try to show it in a pivot table using a number of examples:

Other aspects can be described, but this is not the point. For complete decentralization, it is necessary to take into account only one principle - each step of building a DSS must have its own level of decentralization: domain, hosting, load distribution (both through bandwidth and, for example, through hardware), etc. In turn, this is impossible without a large number of different participants: delegates/miners, full node holders, users, developers and others.

The first important parameter of the DSS is N(p): participant number or PartNum for short. What does this give? Groups for development are such that one “pizza is enough to feed you”: from 3 to 10 people. Number of invites per user: from 3 to 10 (law of 6 handshakes: rules of thumb are important for building antifragile systems).

This leads to the next parameter - N(p)min. As long as the project is supported by the enthusiasm of one/several developers and other participants, this is not important, but when scaling, the situation changes. Look at the long history of fighting for Golos.

Having different development teams has helped Ethereum Classic recently, and independent code auditing prevents CVE-2018-17144 and similar vulnerabilities. But this is the first step.

I’ll explain with the simplest example - on websites. Golos had several clients (golos.io, golos.id, goldvoice and others); Commun has essentially one and this clearly does not make it any less vulnerable to blocking and other methods of force, including a banal DDoS attack or the work of Roskomnadzor. The same goes for endless wallets that do not give the user private keys: it is difficult to build either a network or new thinking on such a foundation.

Equality for everyone and everything

Step two is equality. For DSS, it is important that the subject and object are not just equal (transactionally), but also have clear distinctive features. Now all hope is for the Turing test, but it represents more of a version of digital racism, when bots, AI, virtual avatars, etc. have fewer rights than “true man” or certain communities created by people.

One way to resolve the conflict could be a global reputation system: when connecting to any network, from a local mesh network to a full-scale IoT with tens of billions of connected devices, everyone has zero reputation, and then proves everything through transactions. Can you quickly solve non-trivial equations? Great, and it doesn’t matter whether you are a rain man or some new algorithm inside some neural network connected to the Internet. Do you want to write lengthy texts on the topic of Camus’s work? That will do too, and believe me, software robots here are not as bad as you think.

S == O - equality, but not identity! Subject-to-person equality, which has yet to be known. But today chatbots answer our questions, make calls for surveys, and other “robots” select for us (Alisa from Yandex) or find (Shazam) music and films (Netflix), etc.

This approach allows us not to focus on the presence of mind/intelligence in the device, but to focus on its usefulness.

In fact, Facebook or Telegram do exactly this. Yes, there are certain restrictions during registration, but in general the systems are functioning. Although the number of fake accounts is not decreasing.

Last time I already told you how to solve the problem of spam, which has been haunting us since the creation of the Internet (it accounted for up to 80% of traffic at different periods). Not connected, not signed - no malicious data.

But S == O gives something more: we stop focusing on constant filtering, paradoxically, but, on the contrary, focus on what is important.

What are fomites? If I am not a virologist or another specialist who encounters them, then I am not very interested in newsletters, articles, notes, essays, dissertations, films on the topic, etc. If the time has come for Covid-19, then he himself is interested in learning about viruses as much as possible, quickly and in detail. And most importantly - without fakes, and they are only possible where there is a level of trust in the source. Let me remind you again - blockchain is about DISTRUST.

From the paradigm “we get what someone likes” (be it Siri, a search algorithm in the VK feed, or someone/something else) to the paradigm “we only get what we like/useful.”

To appreciate the thesis, I will give a few more examples. Everyone knows that Google, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and other giants analyze mail and other types of correspondence, calls, etc. What do we get in return? "... things we don't need, for money we don't have, to impress people we don't like."

#fExit: the community boycotted Facebook

In the proposed approach, everything is different:

• those segments that are not needed at a given moment should not be filtered by SaO (Subject-and-Object). This thesis has long been used in time management, but for some reason we still spend time endlessly scrolling through the feed and getting stuck on the TikTok format.
• no matter who advises and what - the (re)solution, the final result of the formation, conditionally - a white list, remain with us. Now everything is based on bans, and this is essentially the digital death of SaO. It's time to move to the “bright side” and learn to communicate there and with those where it will do more good than harm.

The problem is that it seems that even today we make a choice, but this is not so: targeted advertising, a customized feed, Flipboard or the now closed Surfingbird, changing the wallpaper on the desktop for geolocation - all these are components of one cluster called “choice” done for us."

And it is precisely this achievement - Radical Transparency - that is the least of those that have been appreciated by society since the advent of blockchain. The majority refuses to believe that transactional, rather than subjective, identification is sufficient for verification/authentication. Although it was enough for Satoshi to make one of the greatest inventions of mankind and remain anonymous.

This is only possible if SaO becomes a reality, and today we are seeing the first signs of this.

• Lilmiquela is a virtual influencer with more than 2 million followers on Instagram;
• Hatsune Miku has been alive and well since 2007;
• sections of Second Life or the same Decentraland cost quite a specific amount of money.

That is, the boundary between the virtual and the real is blurring, and this is the basis not only for Web 3.0, but also for DSS in particular. But not only from online to offline, but also vice versa: driverless cars have digitized drivers; 3D printed houses have generally made the “telegraphic transmission” of things a fact; quadcopters that digitize the terrain following Google cars, etc. They place us not in the world of cards, but precisely in a world of a different order.

While the thesis S == O will be a mystery to most, the task of enthusiasts is to put it into practice. Otherwise, all the scary tales about AI will become reality, because controlling it through centralized and/or closed decisions means creating a threat to all of humanity.

A distributed (for starters, DSS is possible) and open social network, built on the principle of equality of everyone and everything, will become the first level of protection. In part, this approach, evaluation through utility, has already been implemented: be it sharding or PoI, when we trust not compromised supernodes (SU), but those who act according to the rules; or forecasting trends through expert assessments, where one of the positions may be data (less often, information) from a neural network, etc.

This is step number two. Step number three is nesting.

Connectedness as a criterion of value

Any Dapp, unlike a regular application, has the property of being self-nesting.

First, this means that every Dapp must ultimately be “multi-blockchain.” Connecting the VK and Facebook APIs is not the same as setting up low-level interaction (even through atomic swap) of two social blockchains, when we do not just perform the same action in different environments, as was the case with reposting/cross-posting, but we can also use useful features of the functionality of each of the solutions. Let’s say that now I can make an entry in Yandex.Zen, and receive comments for reposting on my website through the built-in Disqus or FB comments, but these entities will not be interconnected except through the index page and certainly will not have a unified economic component .

At the same time, it is quite possible to set up an exchange of tokens of the ERC standard or any other (including the Bitshares family and others). Moreover, this is correct from the point of view of the Web 3.0 paradigm, when the digitization of social and non-financial types of capital occurs.

I call this property in Dapps self-completion, but it also applies to DAOs, blockchains and multi-solutions. However, the world of Web 2.5 came to this point, when all processes began to be managed via APIs. The same philosophy has given rise to services that seem to have nothing: AirBNB without houses; Uber without taxi; Facebook without content and others, no less famous. We are talking, of course, about the platforms’ own resources, not users.

What does this give when building a DSS? With the right approach, inclusion in any type of similar networks is a priori. This used to be the case with email and a number of “correct” services: if you have email, you are already connected to PayPal. Or vice versa: connected to Yandex.Mail? This means you have access to Yandex.Money, Yandex.Music and further down the list.

But previously this concerned the authorization process and, at best, cross-border data transfer between services (the simplest is payment on online store sites via an iframe from a processing or bank).

The concept of DSS in the style of Web 3.0 allows you to go much further. To begin with, do not install more and more new applications, but try different ones through one: in this case, recursively, that is, the entry point can be any of the related applications/DAOs/networks. A kind of aggregator of the functional, and not the level of the application itself.

What's stopping this? First of all, understanding the competition. Despite the fact that each new major service gives an increase to the system as a whole (a trivial example - Adwords has not only advertising through search, but also in an expanded format; the competition of Yandex and Google gives more opportunities to advertisers and the like), still in itself competition as an eternal struggle for profit remains dominant.

The described approach allows us to achieve that same synergy that is so much talked about. It's like switching from fossil fuel engines/generators to using solar energy in its “pure” form. But to do this, it is necessary to eliminate the main sources of losses: turbines, batteries, transmission networks, etc. This is still not easy offline, but online it is already available. There is no need to sell raw data, but to be transported to a world where activity is valuable (more precisely, action: action or inaction, because in a number of areas doing something is bad; for example, littering is not useful, but not picking up plants is quite).

Now for some reason we are engaged in integration at the level of blockchain solutions (Tendermint/Cosmos, Polkadot and others), but we don’t think about the fact that this thesis is equally suitable for Dapps/DAO/DeFi. Moreover, with this approach, the efficiency in principle FFF can be significantly improved. It sounds like this: fix time, fix money, flex scope, or “it is impossible to guarantee 100% of the functions in 100% of the time and 100% of the budget without compromising the quality of the project,” but in the DSS, each of the component elements can be entrusted with increasing the efficiency of different parameters.

Let me give you an example of tokenization. There is no point in creating the 1001st token, although no one will prohibit this, which only performs a payment function when there are already BTC, ETH and other currencies, including a whole pool of anonymous ones. But exactly the same applies to the rest: here you need to remember point No. 3 from the previous article and understand that competition through the user base is a stone age that does not allow you to step into the future.

What has the constant pumping of oil led to? That's right, to the fact that it is increasingly uncomfortable to live on the planet. What will the pumping of digital oil from social networks of various levels lead to? That’s right, to the same thing, but to add a layer of virtuality of various kinds: if Microsoft’s patent is not used for the good, then very soon we will face an even greater level of depression.

I propose to move to a completely different symbolic-logical cross-section, where data is not a goal (today’s social networks) and not energy (Gas from Ethereum for Dapp or any analogue), but energy in a closed (but not closed!) limitless, but not infinite , an expanding system that, through constant distribution, opens up new horizons and gives everyone the opportunity to try.

To do this, consider another example - airdrop. Initially, the idea was correct: to use non-trivial promotion methods in an innovative environment. But what has she become? Again, to spam: I’m getting all sorts of tokens in my old wallets, but most of them are not needed even at an expensive price.

Why did it happen? Because starting projects do not have enough time and energy to study the services in which one or another wallet owner has invested, to link wallets with the final owner (without identification - just transactional); because the personal accounts of 2018 ruined the whole idea of ​​the ICO, and with it the meaning of identifying the end user; At the same time, analytical agencies and other data analysis services are in no way connected with startups, and investors do not publicly announce their priorities (mostly). So it turns out that we are not aggregating the best of the best, but the worst of the similar.

A trivial example of the implementation of the zero level is a commission for raising funds from a targeted airdrop, that is, for a positive transaction from the results of the work of one entity (analytics company) to another (startup) by attracting third parties (investors). It would seem that we are creating intermediaries again? Yes, but there is nothing wrong with them if they perform a useful function that cannot (yet) be performed in any other way. It is for this reason that banks are not needed today, and not in general: fintech is much more flexible, more mobile and more interesting, after all, than hundreds of branches of even the 13 largest credit players in the world.

Therefore, another important thesis for DSS is connectedness (nesting). Knowing the introductory information, let’s try to answer the question: why are DSS not so popular today and, most importantly, what non-obvious parameters should we look at when developing the DSS architecture of the future?

A brief retrospective analysis, or what to do next?

To begin with, let’s take a few prominent representatives of the implemented DSS layouts:

• Steem - 2020, Steem blockchain.
• Bitwalking - 2020, Dapp.
• Golos - 2020, Dapp.
• Livepeer - 2020, Dapp.
• SportCoin (iTerra) - 2020, Dapp (DRS).
• VIZ - 2020, DAO.
• Commun - 2020, Dapp.
• dTube - 2020, Dapp.

We get approximately the same data for messengers: Adamant, Bitmessage, Crypviser​, Dust, E-chat, Eco, MyHush, Sence, Status, Tox, Will Channels, Keybase - the same years, the number of users (usually even less) and etc.

It is always worth turning to history to understand the subject of study better: is there any development and how is the process going?

Let's take the most obvious example: Facebook. It appeared in October 2003, and already in 2005 the facebook.com domain was purchased for $200,000. This amount was the norm for preICO, so the first thing worth remembering is that much less money was invested in p2p projects than in most VC startups, if we take the investment-period ratio, although the investment efficiency indicators of VC are clearly weaker. Facebook itself received an injection of $240 million already in 2007 - almost exactly four years after its founding. The same applies to the Russian analogue (VK): having appeared in 2006, in 2009 the company already set its sights on the international market.

This is where criticism comes from: they say, classic social networks have developed in 3-4 years, and you... But critics forget that: at that moment the competition was zero, now it is the highest, so in recent years there has been a rise in video services (TikTok) and instant messengers ( Telegram, Snapchat, etc.), rather than “standard” social networks. And this is the second aspect of failure.

One of the biggest difficulties that DSS must overcome is to prove its uniqueness, and it lies in three main parameters: resistance to censorship, monetization of activities, integration of offline and online life. Until one of the analyzed DSS has turned these positive qualities into an unconditional dominant, one should not expect breakthroughs. But the 2020 crisis is an excellent opportunity to find a new audience and investors.

Therefore, let’s try to summarize the series of materials and look at the DSS from a bird’s eye view:

• Decentralization built on PoW/PoS systems is seen as more of a transitional form, because natural mining for each person/device is an act (action/inaction). A distributed social network can only be built from a set of PoW/PoS systems, where the conditional quantum of utility will be some simple (in)action.
• When constructing a DSS, it is worth considering that each type of participant (validator, user, miner, etc.) must, on the one hand, be part of a group with a minimum level of distribution of rights/opportunities (from 3 to 10 people); on the other hand, the overall structure must be constantly expanding (have positive inflation). This will allow, on the one hand, to use the positive consequences of the network effect, in particular, through the value of the network due to quantitative growth according to Metcalfe’s law (do not forget about the dependence Pr(hrd) = k*Ps(sft), and on the other hand, through a simple The technique will allow the community to control all connecting links of the created network.
• Whether we like it or not, S == O is an inevitability in the Web 3.0 paradigm, that is, robots, cyborgs, bots, neural networks (true AI later), smart and not so smart IoT devices, smartphones, computers, digital avatars and other representatives virtual flora and fauna are equal to humans, but for this the DSS must move from subjective identification to transactional, i.e. Each action must be assessed through its benefits for a specific part of the network and/or for it as a whole.
• Various types of attacks created by levels of decentralization (like Sybil attacks) should not be excluded; on the contrary, mechanisms to counter them should be created so that the degree of decentralization remains at the desired level in any case. The rule that helps here is that hacking a system should cost more than the benefit received. Better - much more expensive. Only in this approach will additional layers of protection, such as the proposed Winkle algorithm, make sense. The difficulty lies in the fact that, unlike classical social networks, DSS can be attacked in order to completely destroy the network and this aspect can only be eliminated through the creation of self-control systems (sharding, PoI/PoA, Fair DPoS, mobile mining, anti-censors, etc. .).
• Self-nesting is a necessary consequence of the DSS architecture, so it must be used in the DSS, since otherwise all the advantages of decentralization turn into disadvantages. And this parameter is much more important than TPS or bot protection.
• The levels of protection themselves should be built on different foundations than they are now in most cases: instead of punishment, rewards based only on interests from benefits; instead of linking to personal data - the value of reputation, etc.

Of course, there are some general theses for building social networks, but they have already been stated and generalized many times, so the purpose of the series of materials was to expand the horizons specifically to the non-trivial aspects of creating social networks and help developers, system architects and even ordinary users see the advantages of the uniqueness of DRS, and not the obvious common aspects with classic social networks.

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The author’s profit directly depends on the number of likes (in Steemit they are called upvotes) and comments. Voting is also possible for those who do not have coins on their account, but such “likes” will not in any way affect the income of the owner of the material. The author gives 25% of the amount of royalties received to voting participants. Receiving remuneration from curators is considered a special achievement. For this to happen, you need to have at least one SP token, find interesting content among new materials even before it becomes popular, vote for it and leave a meaningful comment. Steemit only works with English-language content, so you must post articles and publications only in this language.

The topics of materials available for posting on Steemit include: Cryptocurrencies, Travel, Entertainment, Music, Nature, Photography and Real Life Stories. The more voting power you have, the faster you will gain a large number of upvotes. To achieve success in this social network, it is highly desirable to establish relationships with moderators and influential users.

How does the decentralized internet work?

The Centralized Internet relies on servers, while the Decentralized Internet will rely on a peer-to-peer network built on a community of users. Their Internet-connected devices will host the Internet, as opposed to currently hosting the Internet on a bank of powerful servers run by corporations.

Each website on the decentralized Internet will be distributed across hundreds of thousands of nodes on different user devices, which eliminates censorship, IP surveillance and the possibility of a single server crashing or being hacked due to, say, a DDoS attack.

Ideally, code on the Internet should protect user privacy, freedom of expression, and universal access to all information and knowledge. Instead, today, centralized control points make it easier for governments, which tend to censor and surveil everything online, and private companies to collect, share and monetize more personal information than many users would like.

The goal of creating a decentralized network is to reduce or eliminate such centralized points of control. Thus, even if one participant (or several) drops out of the Network, the system will continue to work.

Such a system would better protect user privacy, eliminate the collection of personal user data, provide secure access, and even allow users to buy and sell goods and services directly without intermediaries.

Excessive influence on the government can also be reduced: one project being developed today, Anonymouse, hosts anonymous "microblogging" over the telephone network. In countries threatened by authoritarian governments, such projects can allow information to flow freely.

The technology that is reigniting excitement on the decentralized Internet today is the same one that is fueling the cryptocurrency craze: Blockchain.

How Blockchain technology helps create a decentralized Internet.

A blockchain protocol is designed to enable transactions over a distributed network without the need for an intermediary to control the process. Any information can be viewed by anyone, and it is encrypted in such a way that no one can mess with it.

Several startups are already using blockchain to replace some common internet services: Everipedia is hoping to become the Wikipedia on the blockchain, for example, and Mastodon is hoping to become a decentralized Twitter. While it is possible to operate a decentralized Internet without blockchain technology, most innovators hope that this technology will be the key to a functional peer-to-peer network.

Decentralized Internet - it is important to know how it works and its prospects

In the end, the path to a decentralized internet is less about technology and more about whether the concept can win “the hearts and minds of entrepreneurs and developers,” as a recent Medium article put it. "Before that happens, we're all going to have to address a few issues that are getting in the way of that."