Hive: the best censorship resistant social media currently available!
You've no doubt heard that Donald Trump has been banned from FaceBook and Twitter - if you try to find his Twitter account now, all you see is this:
And at the same time the pro free speech app Parler, favoured by alt-right Trump followers, has been taken down by Amazon (in case you don't know the shop is a bit-player in the Amazon empire, web hosting services are its main thing).
So that's two of the BIG TECH companies - Facebook and Amazon, and the smaller company Twitter, deciding to censor not only an individual but an entire political movement from their platforms.
Personally I'm not a fan of Donald Trump or the Alt Right, but neither am I fan of Big Tech companies deciding to de-platform them with a few lines of code.
It's a stark reminder that if you publish anything to Facebook, Twitter, or anything hosted on AWS, that you do not control your content they do - you do not own your content - they do.
And just like that: >paste pre-written code to delete content here> + >insert account name here< - poof your social media legacy is gone, your network no more.
If you want to secure your social media content, Hive is a better option...
If you've never heard of it, Hive is a blockchain based social media platform.
You can find out more about it and open up an account here: https://hive.io/
When you open up a Hive account, you download your own set of private keys which means that you and only you can post to your account, or delete anything from your account. No one else can.
Because it's a blockchain, once you post your content to Hive, then that content is hard-wired into the chain, imprinted as an immutable block, time stamped and distributed across several servers, no one, not even you, can change that text – it’s immutable.
This makes Hive a very secure place to store a historical, time-stamped record of your text-based thoughts and ideas.
(It also makes it imperative to be very careful about what you put on the chain!).
NB Hive is more than just an immutable ledger of text based content, you can also get rewards in crypto for posting that content, and play games, and even build your own dapps on the same chain, all of which will be stored as transactions on said chain.
Moderation of content is still possible on Front Ends...
NB it's only the raw blockchain data that's truly immutable. Most people will access this data via different front-ends - interfaces built as a second layer on top of the blockchain that make blockchain data more accessible.
You're probably reading this on leofiance.io, but you could also access this article via Peakd.com or read it on hive.blog - two other front ends which connect to the Hive blockchain.
These all read data from the back-end blockchain and present it in different ways.
NB - either of these front ends can selectively censor any account of their choice, or content from any tags. They could effectively have the same rules as Twitter or Facebook for 'universally muting' content for reasons such as 'inciting violence', 'trolling' or 'spam'.
HOWEVER, The difference between Hive and Facebook/ Twitter is this...
That the content the front-ends mute would still be available on the blockchain in the back end.
So, going back to the example of Trump - IF he had been on Hive, his content would still be there, so all he'd have to do to retrieve it and make it accessible again is to knock up another front-end, and anyone who wanted to could access it there.
Personally, I much prefer this as an option for ownership of social media data - I would like to have the ability to be able to go back and maybe in the future look at what Trump has said about certain topics, and what the reactions were. As it stands, I cannot, because Twitter, Facebook and Amazon have re-written that part of history.
NB - this is some proper 1984 level stuff going on here, from Orwell's classic:
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped.”
Except in 2020/ 21 it's not the State doing the erasing, its Big Tech companies.
So if you want to be part of a social media environment that's a little bit less dystopian, maybe get onto Hive and use that as your social media of choice!
If you don't have a hive account yet, get one and start owning your damned content! The easiest way is through Hive Onboard... https://hiveonboard.com/
Credits....
Thanks to @tarazkp for the brief Discord chat that helped clarify a few thoughts on this!
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https://twitter.com/NathanMars7/status/1350259233317642243
Most people aren't fans of Donald trump either but then free speech is what it is, we should be getting out statement of how centralisation can humble you even if you're the most powerful man in the world. Free speech is vital, but then inasmuch as Twitter is a microblogging platform, it's a business platform and its owner can do what it wants. People aren't still getting the reason why decentralisation is the future
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::Dons MAGA hat::
The reason people are that way is because the mainstream media has taught them to do just that. Not saying Trump is perfect but, considering his opposition, (our rulers, career politicians, Hollywood, Academia and more) he has done reasonable well to be assertive of the interests of the American people. Perhaps this is a major factor as to why his enemies feathers are ruffled. It wasn't politics as usual. It wasn't the wolves fleecing the sheep for endless wars in the middle east for profit of the military industrial complex. Trump was doing something different thus they exhausted every resource to paint him in the worst light possible. Yes, he is bombastic at times but maybe that was something we needed to put the wolves in check. Unfortunately, it seems it was not enough and, in my humble opinion, the future is bleak not just for America but the world.
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Although he didn't seem to do too much to limit the power of said corporations either!
But yes he was hardly their pawn!
I get the feeling Biden might be a little easier to control.
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Nicely structured explainer!
This is the part that gets overlooked so often when we talk about Hive being censorship resistant.
Hive is not a total cesspool of shit or a free for all. You can't just come and post spam or illegal content because communities are able to hide it on their front-ends.
But the difference is that they can't take your account or content away from you. You will never lose your account, data or followers on the blockchain level.
If you don't like how any particular front-end displays your data, then go to a different one. You're able to display your blockchain content elsewhere as you please.
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Nicely put - And it is that precise fact that gives the front end developers less power - piss too many people off and they'll just up and leave, with their network.
You can't do that on Facebook!
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It’s like that old saying “they came for my neighbor and I didn’t say or do anything, they came for my friend and I didn’t say or do anything. Now they are coming for me?!?! Who is going to help me?” Or something of the sort. You get the point though. They did the same thing to Alex Jones. He had some wild things to say and not a lot loved him but once they removed him they came for everyone else who spoke against the craziness. The same thing is happening now. If you cancel a president of a country like the United States what the hell is wrong with people? His message might not be the best and many disagree (just out of mob mentality honestly, following the repetitions of media puppets) but to cancel the most powerful person in the world on these platforms sends shivers down my spine with how far these psychos will go to do what they want.
They also shut down trump on his campaign page from receiving money. Crazy times we live in for sure.
It is especially worrying, and at a time when more and more people depend on visibility to make a living.
there seems to be no apparent transparent appeals process either.
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HIVE is absolutely the answer to the social media problems we are seeing right now. People are scrambling to things like GAB and Mastadon, but HIVE is the place to be. We just need to get the word out! Onboarding is tough.
I've vaguely heard of those two alternatives, but I'm not too aware of them!
I know what you mean about onboarding - the first response I found following @theycallmedan's twitter initiative inviting people to hive had a counter response 'it's horrible, i tried twice to sign up and failed'.
It is a problem!
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https://twitter.com/realsociology/status/1350390625762471937
So when is he coming?
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Haha, probably never, ironically one imagines he'd want control over the network himself!
Wouldn't surprise me if he's already working on something.
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Hive is great for content creation, but sadly it isn't a substitute for Twitter and Fakebook, a lot of people still get that mixed up.
Hive is the perfect platform if you manage a Fakebook page and create content and generate discussions and engagement. But 99% of Fakebook users don't create content other than a few short sentences or sharing news. That isn't the type of content for Hive.
What people really need, is a decentralised free speech messaging platform.
I dunno, there's no reason why we couldn't use it like Facebook, another front end.
Although I'm not confident it would be able to scale that easily.
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I would not particularly want to see Trump here and I doubt he will come as the audience is too small for his ego.I think Twitter could have handled him better. They could have people moderating his tweets in real time. As it is he can say he's being censored. Expect him to pop up elsewhere.
I know the Hive front ends do block content from certain accounts. They can be forced to do that by local laws of wherever the site is hosted. The owners may opt to block others too. Anyone could probably clone the software to set up their own version that could even ignore the effects of flag. We cannot stop anyone accessing the blockchain unless enough witnessed collude to block them (as far as I understand it).
Hive can be many things and censorship resistance is a factor. It remains to be seen how powerful a draw that is. I just hope it does not get flooded with abusive and hateful content.
I don't imagine Trump will come here either!
I think maybe the witnesses can change blocks that have been written, I think. Not sure?!?
I still think Hive is the most accessible working platform for owning your content - whether it gets overtaken by some newer tech remains to be seen!
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Hive may be many things what but prevents hateful and abusive content.
https://twitter.com/Fatherfaith1/status/1415287302428020736
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