"Notes on Survival in the Era of Digital Totalitarianism" 14. A Preliminary Study on Decentralized Networks

Social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter outside the wall and WeChat, Weibo, Douban, Zhihu, and Post Bar inside the wall are all typical products of centralized networks. User data is uniformly stored on the central server, and it is all in the hands of platform service providers. Therefore, the Cyberspace Administration of China can unscrupulously delete posts and cancel accounts, or require operators such as Tencent and Sina to self-censor through evil laws and administrative orders. Create white terror; Facebook and other US technology giants use this to analyze user habits, accurately deliver advertisements and other information, and monetize the massive user data they have. After the Facebook user data leak scandal was exposed in 2018, more and more people began to be wary of the Surveillance Capitalism business model and traditional centralized network dominated by giants such as Facebook.

The decentralized network corresponding to the centralized network no longer needs a highly centralized central server. Every participant in the decentralized network automatically becomes a node in the network, and the data will be distributed and stored in each participating network. equipment, thereby avoiding the possibility of abuse of dominance by Internet giants who enjoy absolute control over data. Decentralized networks can make up for some of the disadvantages of centralized networks and help protect users' privacy and information self-determination. However, it is still not perfect and cannot fully replace centralized networks in the short term. The editor has limited knowledge of decentralized networks, and here only provides relevant terms and explanations from Wikipedia for readers' reference only.

1 ZeroNet

ZeroNet , translated as "Zero Net" in Chinese, is an Internet-like distributed network based on peer-to-peer network users. ZeroNet is headquartered in Budapest, Hungary. ZeroNet does not provide anonymity protection by default, but users can use Tor to hide IP addresses to achieve anonymity. ZeroNet uses Bitcoin encryption technology and the BitTorrent network protocol. Many popular websites are now hosted on the platform, while proprietary features such as mail clients, file managers and news clients add value to ZeroNet's ecosystem.

2 Mastodon

Mastodon (official Chinese translation "Vientiane", netizens also known as "mammoth") is a free open source, decentralized distributed microblogging social network. Its user interface and operation method are similar to Twitter, but the entire network is not operated by a single organization, but a decentralized social network composed of multiple servers independently operated by different operators exchanging data in a federated manner. Each Mastodon operating site is called an "Instance". Users can register with any open registration entity, and users on any entity can communicate with users on other entities.

3 Steemit

Steemit is a blog and social networking site that rewards content publishers based on the Steem blockchain. Users can earn Steem and Steem Dollars, two tradable tokens provided by the Steem blockchain, by posting, discovering, and commenting. Steemit, Inc., which runs Steemit, is a private company based in New York and headquartered in Virginia. The highlight of Steemit is that the content published on the platform will be stored in the blockchain, which can theoretically be stored forever (and cannot be deleted once published); Coin rewards.

At present, the ways to obtain a Steemit account mainly include free registration, paid purchases using encrypted digital currencies such as Bitcoin, and purchasing accounts from existing account holders. Registering a Steemit account for free is not very friendly to users in mainland China, and often the application is sent out and there is no news. If you just want an account to like other people’s articles to help her/him generate income, it’s okay to use Alipay to buy one from someone who already has an account; if you want to use Steemit as a blogging platform for publishing original content, it is recommended to use https ://anon.steem.network Use encrypted digital currency to buy a Steemit account.

4 IPFS

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a network transport protocol designed to create persistent and distributed storage and share files. It is a content-addressable peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol. The nodes in the IPFS network will form a distributed file system. It is an open source project developed by Protocol Labs with the help of the open source community since 2014.

IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that attempts to connect to the same file system for all computing devices. In some ways, IPFS is similar to the World Wide Web, but it can also be thought of as a separate BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within the same Git repository. In other words, IPFS provides a high-throughput, content-addressable block storage model, with content-related hyperlinks. This forms a generalized Merkle directed acyclic graph (DAG). IPFS combines distributed hash tables, encouraged block exchanges, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other. Distributed content delivery can save bandwidth and prevent DDoS attacks that HTTP schemes may encounter.

The file system can be accessed in a variety of ways, including FUSE and HTTP. Adding local files to the IPFS file system makes them available to the world. File representation is based on its hash, thus facilitating caching. The files are distributed using a BitTorrent-based protocol. Other users who view the content also contribute to making the content available to others on the web. IPFS has a name service called IPNS, which is a PKI-based global name space for building trust chains, which is compatible with other NS, and can map DNS, .onion, .bit, etc. to IPNS.

Compared with network disks such as Google Drive and Dropbox under the centralized network, P2P-based IPFS is more difficult to be blocked by GFW. V2Ray has begun to use IPFS to distribute installation packages and client applications: Currently, for file sharing, P2P is a mainstream The solution is IPFS. Similar to BitTorrent, IPFS has no central server, and you can connect to other IPFS nodes to download specified files. The file name (or directory name) is a string, with this string, you can download the V2Ray installation package.

—— v2ray: try to use IPFS to distribute V2Ray installation package

5 Matters

Matters is a content ecosystem founded by Annie Zhang Jie Ping, former editor-in- chief of Duan Media . Matters uses blockchain as the underlying technology to connect the community in a decentralized manner, store information with IPFS, and encourage users to create high-quality content and give back.

see:
Solidot | Facebook pays teens to install its VPN app to collect privacy, announces it will shut down after exposure
The Verge | Apple blocks Facebook from running its internal iOS apps
ZeroNet - Wikipedia
How ZeroNet works
How to use ZeroNet over Tor
Mastodon - Wikipedia
Mastodon project official website
Mammoth Chinese Site
A picture of Haidudu, the maintainer of the mammoth Chinese website , understands the mammoth project
Liker Mastodon
Steemit registration page
Interplanetary File System - Wikipedia
IPFS official website
Medium | Matters Lab: Another possibility of social media: Arendt's table (2018-04-02)
Medium | Matters Lab: Matters Project Draft: Reshaping the Content Value Chain (2018-05-31)
Medium | Matters Lab: A Letter to Matters Friends: Sail to the Stars (2018-11-09)