[Talk Proposal] Blogchain: Using IPFS and NEAR to build decentralized discourse

[nadimkobeissi]

About your talk

Title

Blogchain: Using IPFS and NEAR to build decentralized discourse

Languages

• 🇫🇷
• 🇬🇧

Estimated duration

20min-25min

Required knowledge level

Network	Cryptography	Blockchain	General Tech
[ ] None	[x] None	[ ] None	[ ] None
[x] Beginner	[ ] Beginner	[ ] Beginner	[ ] Beginner
[ ] Advanced	[ ] Advanced	[x] Advanced	[x] Advanced
[ ] Expert	[ ] Expert	[ ] Expert	[ ] Expert

Video recording

• Yes (mandatory)
• Yes (if possible)
• No

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Description of your talk

This talk is about Blogchain, the decentralized discourse platform that we've been building over at Capsule Social during the past year.

When you write on a traditional online publishing platform, you're essentially handing over your content into the custody of a set of actors that could, for one reason or another, be pushed into delisting your content or otherwise moderating it in ways that are sometimes fair, but sometimes less so. You also centralized your content's availability in a single hosting provider, which could be taken offline or censored in certain regions, for reasons that, again, are sometimes valid, sometimes arbitrary.

What we're building with Blogchain takes advantage of decentralization technology in order to allow you to retain more sovereignty over your content. By building on top of IPFS, we can at least guarantee that content will remain peered on IPFS nodes no matter what — including if we decide to delist it from Blogchain, which we still plan to do for truly objectionable content.

Also, because our platform is built on NEAR, this means that any account-level moderation action that we take will need to be done via smart contract, providing an authenticated, transparent ledger of all account actions, thereby prohibiting platform abuses such as "shadow banning".

In those ways, Blogchain guards writers and readers against platform abuses that could potentially originate from us, the creators of the platform. This makes Blogchain special in ways that aren't currently matched by traditional online publishing platforms.

Furthermore, Blogchain's special architecture also makes it more censorship-resistant: if some country's Internet Service Providers block access to blogchain.app, all anyone has to do is set up their own front-end somewhere else, and just query and parse Blogchain content off of IPFS, which will be peered thanks to IPFS's decentralized network, organized thanks to OrbitDB's decentralized CRDT, and parseable thanks to Blogchain's pretty simple JSON format for posts.

We're excited to present the challenges and results of working on Blogchain, and are also interested in making new connections and working with new folks.

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About you

• Name: Nadim Kobeissi
• Discord handle: nadim#5129
• Other contact info: @kaepora
• Links to your previous talks: Talk, Talk, Talk
• Other (your projects, etc...): Personal website
• Availability (monthly number, date): Any time is fine, Friday/Saturday/Sunday preferred.