
Akasha: A Social Media Network Powered by Ethereum and IPFS - alexandrerond
http://akasha.world/
======
kang
A service like this already exists - zapchain.com (bitcoin instead of ether).
I have earned billions of satoshi on it but well, it is failing. Because
identity could not be solved with partial blockchain, same mistake Akasha is
doing.

An identity is a proxy for past work done, which the identifier further wishes
to use as a proxy for future working. A blockchain bypasses this by directly
asking a proof of current work, irrelevant of past work done.

When a system does not use an exclusive blockchain, the identity is unable to
proxy itself through PoW. Spam rules zapchain now.

To make this work they need a PoW Akashacoin.

~~~
MihaiAlisie
We are aware of zapchain and their issues. I'd like to point that zapchain is
not completely decentralized - it is rather a hybrid application using servers
for content distribution and blockchain for payments.

Regarding security/spam - Proof of Work is not the only way you can secure
networks; one of the interesting potential solutions we explored is a sort of
Proof of Stake mechanism.

Basically this would allow a sort of "deposit" scheme where you would deposit
an X amount of tokens for an Y amount of time and depending on the feedback
received such as votes for example you would either get the deposit back or
lose it. That would make it expensive to spam while not affecting the people
generating good content as they would get back their tokens.

Things get a bit tricky when we're talking about controversial topics and how
that would be treated but that's a different thing.

That being said, this is an open and complex discussion that probably will
take a while to figure out.

In the meantime we're happy with proving that _it is possible_ to have a
completely decentralized publishing system that doesn't need any servers,
creating in the process a product that empowers people with unfettered freedom
of expression. One step at a time :)

~~~
mr_sturd
Good luck with this, I'm really excited to give it a go.

You say that Akasha _" doesn't need any servers"_. If a user is to run a
"node" on their PC, how will the network react if a friend/follower is offline
when data is requested from them. Also, will a node be runnable on a home
server system, allowing for higher-availability and easier backups of personal
data?

~~~
hosh
@mr_stud the functionality you are asking about is addressed by IPFS. I worked
on the project briefly about a year ago -- exciting stuff. IPFS's content
distribution is similar to that of a torrent. So the content gets stored
across the network, with certain concentrations where people can pin it. It
leaves room for giving an economic incentive for pinning it. Cost of storage
shifts over to the people who care about the content rather than the people
who care about it's distribution.

There still would be a case where a friend's content is unavailable because it
is offline. If the friend is offline too much, one way is to have an
intermediary willing to pin the content when that friend comes briefly online.
It may be possible if the friend is within a large enough group, there will
always be some sort of coverage.

Check out the IPFS website sometime. There is a white paper and demo videos.

~~~
mr_sturd
IPFS is largely the reason for me battering F5, on this thread, this
afternoon.

I've only briefly looked into it, on its website, upon originally reading
about it. I will definitely give it more attention, have a deeper read, and
have a go at running an instance to see what can be done.

------
exolymph
It mystifies me that people seem to think users will suddenly start caring
about decentralization and privacy. If either of those things is your social
network's USP, you're sunk.

~~~
captainmuon
Decentralization is more powerful than you think. If I open a social network
that is just like Facebook, it will go under. But if it is also properly
decentralized (=federated), meaning you can have account at my site but
interact with every Facebook user as if you had an account there, Facebook
immediately looses it's network effect. And if I offer an additional silly
feature, say let users customize the color of their home page, my
decentralized net is at an advantage.

Unfortunately, Facebook explicitly forbids that kind of interaction, of
course.

I see two options how decentralized nets could win:

1) Legislation that forces large sites like Facebook to federate (makes sense
if you argue that FB has become infrastructure) or without that:

2) Lots of people try to build federated sites, and fail... but one day,
Facebook goes the way of Yahoo and MySpace, and one of the decentralized
contenders happens to be the new Facebook by chance.

~~~
amelius
> Legislation that forces large sites like Facebook to federate

This could happen faster than you might think. The Telecommunications Act of
1996 ([1]) just needs some updating to current technological standards.

Quoted:

> Interconnectedness. Since communications services exhibit network effects
> and positive externalities, new entrants would face barriers to entry if
> they could not interconnect their networks with those of the incumbent
> carriers. Thus, another key provision of the 1996 Act sets obligations for
> incumbent carriers and new entrants to interconnect their networks with one
> another, imposing additional requirements on the incumbents because they
> might desire to restrict competitive entry by denying such interconnection
> or by setting terms, conditions, and rates that could undermine the ability
> of the new entrants to compete.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telecommunications_Act_of_1996)

~~~
mxuribe
I'm not so optimistic here. To my knowledge if it hasn't been changed to force
interconnectedness of email, I doubt it will be changed only to force
interconnectedness of social networks like FB. But i guess we'll see.

~~~
throwanem
Why would it need to be changed to force interconnectedness of email? Email
has always been federated.

------
MihaiAlisie
Hello everyone,

AKASHA founder here.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our project!

~~~
brennannovak
Ambitious project. Good luck :-)

\- Will Akasha leverage existing social graphs (fbook, twitter, email, phone)?

\- Does Akasha plan to interoperate with any of them?

\- Why is a blockchain needed? What aspect of decentralized publishing does
this solve? Verifiability of content? Pub/sub relationships?

~~~
MihaiAlisie
Many thanks!

> Will Akasha leverage existing social graphs (fbook, twitter, email, phone)

This is actually something we were discussing yesterday with Dr. Gavin Wood,
one of the founders of ethereum and ethcore. It is a bit tricky to do without
compromising the privacy of the users (associating an insecure form of
identification to a key/address) due to the nature of blockchains, but there
are a few interesting ideas on how to solve this issue. We’re looking into it
but we need to experiment and see which one is the best before deploying
something like this inside our application.

> Does Akasha plan to interoperate with any of them?

Social web 2.0 applications such as Twitter and Facebook are not necessary the
friendliest when it comes to interoperability but as we will approach the beta
we will look into making an API allowing interesting things to be done in an
IFTTT fashion.

> Why is a blockchain needed? What aspect of decentralized publishing does
> this solve? Verifiability of content? Pub/sub relationships?

The chain removes completely servers from the picture and enables us to create
a truly decentralized publishing mechanism by adding IPFS to the mix - since
it is expensive to store content directly on chain, we're storing IPFS hashes
on chain.

Besides verifiability and pub/sub relationships, identity/profile management
and micropayments are also a big pluses that come bundled with the ethereum
chain.

Hope this answers your questions!

------
mxuribe
I'm really hopeful that this - or for that matter any reasonable platform -
deploys and gets used. I'm a big fan of decentralization and hope these kinds
of efforts pan out! Good luck to the Akasha folks!

~~~
MihaiAlisie
Thank you for the kind words and support!

------
max_
Here is a simmilar project in Golang
[https://github.com/vole/vole](https://github.com/vole/vole)

~~~
mr_sturd
It's a shame that it's using _BitTorrent Sync_. Use of something open source,
with an API, like _Syncthing_ , could allow for a smoother experience in
finding users to follow, rather than manually copy-pasting shared secrets.

I have had my eye on [https://ind.ie/](https://ind.ie/), who forked
_Syncthing_ in order to build a social platform upon.

------
wtbob
All I can see is a blank white page — doesn't fill me with confidence.

~~~
MihaiAlisie
Hello,

akasha.world is at the moment just a presentation website hosted via GitHub
Pages. We needed javascript to make it pretty :)

If you want to find out more about our project with javascript disabled, our
blog should be readable [http://blog.akasha.world/](http://blog.akasha.world/)

~~~
wtbob
> We needed javascript to make it pretty

You can make a page pretty just with CSS; and even if you add behaviour via
JavaScript, you can still degrade gracefully.

I see nothing but a blank page in both lynx and eww.

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satbyy
A side note, but couldn't help notice ".world". Wonder why they didn't buy
akasha.space which is more suitable because akasha means "space" or "sky" in
Indian languages. (500 USD to buy the domain name though. May be affordable?)

------
amelius
I was hoping to read something about the protocols. For example, how do they
handle access control (e.g. so that only friends can see my status, photos, or
so that groups can be managed)? How are updates broadcasted (without polling)?

~~~
MihaiAlisie
Hi there!

In the first release/MVP stage AKASHA will resemble a lot to Twitter/Medium in
this regard, in the sense that your published entries will be public and
visible by everyone.

That being said, access control is on our roadmap but it is not a priority at
the moment.

The updates are broadcasted via the Ethereum network through a smart contract
that records and dispatches events associated with profiles such as new
entries.

This way, the people that follow you on AKASHA will receive in their stream a
notification letting them know that a new entry has been published and can be
accessed via IPFS at hash X.

~~~
omphalos
Can people join this network without downloading an application - will it be
available in the browser? The reason I ask is most decentralized applications
up to this point require a download to start your own node (zeronet for
example). Availability from the browser I believe is important for
decentralized applications because it lowers the barrier to entry for
consumers.

PS., not sure if you noticed, but some of your comments on this page are
marked dead. I have no idea why this has been done to you.

~~~
MihaiAlisie
Hello,

In the first phase an application is needed as interacting with the
Ethereum/IPFS network currently requires a local Ethereum/IPFS node.

IPFS for example is currently working on a javascript implementation that
would make it usable from normal browsers and basically "invisible" for
average users. Ethereum also has some efforts in this direction but most
likely we will see these things coming together somewhere around Q3/Q4 2016.

When these options will be available we will definitely make use of them as we
understand the potential adoption gains we can have by removing the need to
install an app.

In the meantime we were thinking to setup a few IPFS gateways that would serve
a static version of the content in the form of a normal website
([http://akasha.world](http://akasha.world) for example).

This way people can at least access the content/read/share it over traditional
Web 2.0 mediums. On the other hand, if they want to interact with the network
(publish/comment/vote) then they would need to install the app. Not the best
solution, we know, but seems like a decent compromise while the tech "gets
there".

> PS., not sure if you noticed, but some of your comments on this page are
> marked dead. I have no idea why this has been done to you.

I have no idea why this was done either...Did I broke any HN posting rule
without knowing?

------
arisAlexis
Here is a similar project writedown.co and will be probably transitioned to
work with lisk.io. Disclaimer I am the founder

------
vr3690
Wasn't clear from the page. What can I use it for? Why does it exist?

~~~
bydo
>What can I do with AKASHA?

>You can publish, share and vote for entries, similar to Medium and other
modern publishing platforms, with the difference that your content is actually
published over a decentralized network rather than on our servers. Moreover,
the votes are bundled with ETH micro transactions so if your content is good
you’ll make ETH from it – in a way, mining with your mind.

~~~
onion2k
_if your content is good you’ll make ETH from it_

Does it have to be _my_ content? Is there anything to stop me writing a bot
that looks for popular Medium/Reddit/HN/whatever articles and post them to
AKASHA under my name to harvest ETH?

That's exactly what people will do if they believe there's money to be made.

~~~
Bombthecat
Nothing, I also guess it is a good chance to make money from cat pictures :)

------
hiddentao
Will this use Swarm instead of IPFS once it's out? Also, using contracts costs
gas. So how will that be paid for? What's the business model?

~~~
MihaiAlisie
We will definitely experiment with Swarm once it's out and see how well it
fits with our needs. This document covers some of the differences between
swarm & IPFS for those interested: [https://github.com/ethersphere/go-
ethereum/wiki/IPFS-&-SWARM](https://github.com/ethersphere/go-
ethereum/wiki/IPFS-&-SWARM)

For the MVP we will gift a bit of ETH to each user that installs AKASHA and
creates a profile. We are talking about enough ETH to enable an average user
to publish, comment and vote for a few good days. The "perfect" amount will
most likely be determined after observing how real users interact with the
application during the alpha. If along the way the user will generate content
or comments that will in turn generate upvotes he will refill/increase his ETH
balance.

It's important to note that _users will be able to read entries and comments
without needing any ETH_ so access to information is free in this regard. ETH
is required only when you want to interact with the dapp living on the
Ethereum network.

In any case, from my rough calculations, the costs involved in publishing an
entry with 1 tag would be recovered after receiving 1 upvote. All the upvotes
beyond that point would be profits going to the author.

We are also open to experimenting with things that might enable us to take
over some of the interaction costs at the smart contract architecture level,
but that is outside the scope of the MVP.

As for the business model we don't like ads in general so we want to
experiment as much as possible on this side as well to see if we can co-create
a sustainable social media network model that does not rely on ads to survive.

We don't know yet if that model means a custom token, a micro-fees scheme or
something completely different that we can't even imagine at this point so we
chose focus first on building the dapp and learn from the actual usage what
direction we should take.

