Why bother using a blockchain for anything in the system, though? (I understand why one would want to use cryptocurrency for micropayments in a system like this – though it seems strange to be using them for such small chunks of content – but even storing hash ordering in a blockchain seems unnecessary since total ordering of microblog statuses is rarely desirable enough to be worth guaranteeing.)
Also – you need ethreum to even sign up, but from the ‘how’ section it looks like the only distribution of coin is via voluntary tips and for initial posts. Why not take advantage of the micropayments to encourage content pinning (and thus encourage the network to maintain a copy of older posts)? After all, just viewing a stream from a local client would temporarily dump that content into your cache and replicate it, and since you’ve got a public record of fetches literally in the ethreum blockchain, you can verify who has viewed any given hash and determine how many replicas exist without any kind of central control anyhow.
Why bother using a blockchain for anything in the system, though?
Read the links on their website for why (something to do with the goal they’re trying to achieve).
since total ordering of microblog statuses is rarely desirable enough to be worth guaranteeing
Says you? Untamperable ordering of status is highly valuable, given that no other social network seems to be able to do it (with the possible exception of Mastodon, but it doesn’t attempt to provide a guarantee).
No other social network I am aware of even attempts to have consistent total ordering of unrelated status updates (as distinct from timestamping). If there’s a benefit to this in the context in which microblogging services are used, I am not aware of it – total ordering in a distributed system is difficult to achieve, and those systems that achieve it (such as blockchains) are generally applied to situations like finance where total ordering is unambiguously valuable (and even then, are criticized for their overhead).
Mastodon neither provides consistent total ordering of toots nor attempts to provide it; in fact, ordering of toots even in the timeline may diverge from timestamp order, and in cases of federation delays caused by load or poor connectivity, the toots in any timeline may be out of order by months or years. Mastodon doesn’t even completely-successfully produce consistent ordering of toots in a thread, which is both more easily achievable and more clearly desirable!
Why use the blockchain at all? The blockchain provides a guarantee of who posted something when, and ties together all the data in one location.
This is what Twitter does too. Unless the threat model is that the service (Twitter in this case) is maliciously changing the content of its users tweets to … discredit them?
Edit I did not consider the risks of account banning and “demonetization”, which are indeed valid concerns.
It’s unclear from the description whether a user can delete their content after posting it.
Kudos for using IPFS for storage.
Why bother using a blockchain for anything in the system, though? (I understand why one would want to use cryptocurrency for micropayments in a system like this – though it seems strange to be using them for such small chunks of content – but even storing hash ordering in a blockchain seems unnecessary since total ordering of microblog statuses is rarely desirable enough to be worth guaranteeing.)
Also – you need ethreum to even sign up, but from the ‘how’ section it looks like the only distribution of coin is via voluntary tips and for initial posts. Why not take advantage of the micropayments to encourage content pinning (and thus encourage the network to maintain a copy of older posts)? After all, just viewing a stream from a local client would temporarily dump that content into your cache and replicate it, and since you’ve got a public record of fetches literally in the ethreum blockchain, you can verify who has viewed any given hash and determine how many replicas exist without any kind of central control anyhow.
Read the links on their website for why (something to do with the goal they’re trying to achieve).
Says you? Untamperable ordering of status is highly valuable, given that no other social network seems to be able to do it (with the possible exception of Mastodon, but it doesn’t attempt to provide a guarantee).
No other social network I am aware of even attempts to have consistent total ordering of unrelated status updates (as distinct from timestamping). If there’s a benefit to this in the context in which microblogging services are used, I am not aware of it – total ordering in a distributed system is difficult to achieve, and those systems that achieve it (such as blockchains) are generally applied to situations like finance where total ordering is unambiguously valuable (and even then, are criticized for their overhead).
Mastodon neither provides consistent total ordering of toots nor attempts to provide it; in fact, ordering of toots even in the timeline may diverge from timestamp order, and in cases of federation delays caused by load or poor connectivity, the toots in any timeline may be out of order by months or years. Mastodon doesn’t even completely-successfully produce consistent ordering of toots in a thread, which is both more easily achievable and more clearly desirable!
From “How Peepeth works”:
This is what Twitter does too. Unless the threat model is that the service (Twitter in this case) is maliciously changing the content of its users tweets to … discredit them?
Edit I did not consider the risks of account banning and “demonetization”, which are indeed valid concerns.
It’s unclear from the description whether a user can delete their content after posting it.
Someone pointed out that this doesn’t seem to be open source, and there’s another similar project called Numa that is.