Decentralized Media Comparison: The Best Networks Reviewed
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A new wave of decentralized media networks is being developed which are set to transform the way that we publish, consume and share many different types of information and media. Many of them are still in their early stages and under heavy development, but the movement from centralized global media corporations to true people powered P2P media is rapidly picking up pace.
I’ve written about several of these projects before, and have made no secret about the potential I see in them. But it is clear from forums and other chatter on the internet that it is difficult for people to tell exactly where each project fits into the media landscape, how they compare to each other, what they are each good for and what their individual limitations are. So to help you out I’ve created a condensed comparison table including the most popular projects, along with a short review of each one which you will find below the table. I should also note that I haven’t included Lbry.io – this is not because it isn’t any good, its purely due to the fact that I found it very difficult to get sufficient information about it.
Decentralized Media Comparison Table
Project: | DECENT | Steem | Alexandria | Synereo | SAFE Network | ZeroNet |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Most Like... (But not necessarily only like) | Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime, Torrents | Netflix, iTunes, Amazon Prime | Facebook, Twitter | Dropbox, The Internet itself. | Wordpress, Blogger | |
Premium Content | ✔ | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
Tipping and Other Micro-Earnings | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
Paid Content (Advertising) | ✘ | Sort of (Coin owners can increase prominence of certain content across the network) | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ |
Privacy Enhancements | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔✔✔ (Including Anonymous Currency) | ✘ |
Social Networks | Limited | Limited | ✘ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ |
Multimedia | ✔✔✔ (Including Streaming) | ✘ | ✔✔✔ (Including Streaming) | Limited | ✔ | ✘ |
Media Specific Apps Planned (music, news etc) | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
Website or Magazine Creation | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ | ✔ |
Decent
Using a combination of torrent and blockchain technology, DECENT is aiming to create a complete media distribution protocol.
If the upcoming ICO reaches its funding goals there will be a range of apps for publishing and sharing everything from music to movies to newspapers or magazines all built on the same underlying network. Publishers can charge for premium content, taking payment for downloads or on a per-view basis with multimedia streaming, or make their content available for free.
This has the potential to create alternatives to services like iTunes or Netflix for high quality and professionally produced media, but also a more reliable (due to network rewards) and privacy enhanced alternative to torrent file sharing, as well as tools for people to create their own blog, newspaper or magazine.
Disclosure: This is the network which Cryptorials has chosen to publish our content.
Steem
Steem is a social publishing and content sharing app which works in a very similar way to websites like Reddit. Users submit content and vote on content submitted by others. Although content is published via a decentralized blockchain, the interface is currently limited to a centralized website.
The big difference between Steem and Reddit which serves as the unique selling point is that users earn Steem tokens whenever their content is upvoted, and can even earn coins as a successful curator by being among the first to upvote popular posts. Users who own more Steem tokens give greater earnings to others when they upvote, and also earn more themselves from curation rewards. Bots are able to post and curate on an equal footing with humans.
Steem also features an investment option whereby users can hold the network’s tokens or ‘Steem dollars’ which are pegged to the same value as USD, and earn interest.
Alexandria
The most established network featured here, Alexandria uses IPFS and the Florincoin blockchain.
Users can download or stream media from a wide range of categories, including music, movies, videos, 3D printer designs, recipes and so on. Creators can make their content available for free and accept tips, or they can choose to charge per download or per view.
In addition to the downloadable client, you can both submit and browse content from the Alexandria website, making it easier for beginner’s and the general public to access.
Synereo
With the development of exciting new blockchain technologies, Synereo allows for a high degree of scaling and advanced smart contracts – making it a more general blockchain project which anybody can use to build a wide range of decentralized apps, rather than specifically a media protocol.
But with a social layer baked in, the flagship app is certainly the social network being built by the Synereo team. At the core of this social network is the ‘attention economy’, which rewards users for interacting with sponsored content and targets advertising based on user attention and interaction without the need to exploit users’ personal information.
Compared to social media giants like Facebook and Twitter, Synereo also offers enhanced privacy and free speech protection.
SAFE
Maidsafe’s SAFE Network aims to offer ‘Secure Access For Everyone’ – and have the ambitious goal of decentralizing the entire internet.
SAFE is primarily a decentralized cloud storage / cloud hosting network, but from this simple beginning they aim to ultimately replace the need for central servers hosting websites and apps with a network of individual ‘farmers’ all around the world.
There is a strong emphasis on protecting the privacy of both publishers and media consumers, and a range of third party apps already in the works such as the Safex decentralized exchange project.
ZeroNet
Combining torrent-like technology with Bitcoin cryptography for securing sites, ZeroNet allows anybody to easily create a decentralized website or blog using html and css.
One of the most notable features is the integration with Namecoin’s decentralized DNS solution, which allows Zeronet to host sites with easy to use domain names.
While I think the descriptions are spot on, that chart with checkmarks is misleading. You can make those say anything you like by cherry picking the questions 🙂
All of these projects are super exciting.
Good article !
It is very difficult to pick which headings to use – so you are right that tables like that don’t give a complete picture. Any suggestions in that regard are welcome.
I think your misrepresenting most of these projects. Overall your just saying what they are self promoting themselves as. Some look like they will say anything so people invest in their ICO. Steem has a working platform that is quickly growing. Synereo’s social network will be the worlds first fully decentralised social media and this is just part of the project. Alpha is coming in September as you published yesterday. Alexandria and Safe Network have strong development teams as you can see. Decent has a white paper with an Proof of Concept they outsourced. So in general you are comparing apples to oranges.
The problem in Crypto is over promising and under delivering. We have seen it 1000 times thus far. We should focus on the technology because the ideas are here but mostly empty promises. Steem is growing and while I am doubtful of the intentions behind it, its working right now which no other project on the list compares. We should not compare ideas to code. We also know that none of these projects will end up as they now are marketing themselves as.
Now I would like to see a team comparison. After all the decentralised revolution will be built by the people building it. If you did an analysis on each development team this would be an important article.
Thanks for a well thought out comment, you make some good points.
You are definitely right that many of these projects go beyond simply being ‘decentralized media’ platforms, particularly synereo, but in order to compare them I was just looking at that aspect – this wasn’t meant to be an overall comparison of the projects.
Perhaps I should have made it clear that some are further along than others too – I’ll think about how I might add that in. And I would like to read a comparison of the teams too!
This is a good thread and I will string it along just a bit simply because what Alex says has merit.
I arrived on this page searching for comparisons of altcoins
specifically because of the impetus from popularity of Steemit.
Steemit has some issues you hint at and many are beginning to be aware of,
which could eventually be a springboard for their ‘competitors’.
The success of Steemit is history repeating itself – humans tend to fall for the shiniest coins in the dirt.
The question of the philosophy and ethics driving the teams who create such venues matters ulimately.
A further point to observe is how responsive the teams are – do they respond, do they simply react,
or do they embrace flaws with a passion to improve ?
As for Steemit, there seems to remain a lot of closed doors behind which not much is understood.
Is this the case with the others ?
Some of us are picky about where we invest our time and effort.
cheers, and keep the minds open
Alex, interesting comment, but it is not true that DECENT outsourced their Proof of Concept or Whitepaper. I can vouch for it as a founder.
DECENT has a real working ALPHA that has already been demonstrated in DECENT Prototype Demo at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTazbh5BW80 (The GUI is not nice enough, but it’s much better for the layman than just command line).
We have a much nicer GUI on the way.
This is a proven technology concept using advanced asymmetric and symmetric cryptography, AES, Shamir Secret Sharing and much more.
Please check out DECENT Whitepaper http://decent.ch/decent-whitepaper.pdf
DECENT Yellowpaper https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YX1OpxP_jk2Ncwk2fA44yFHe3a0DJxZHL7OGmMzV4tw/edit#heading=h.98x6wzy9fmbu
If you are interested in technology or dev updates, feel to join DECENT Slack at http://decent-project.herokuapp.com/ or our Bitcointalk Thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1162392.new
If you have any further questions or comments about DECENT, feel free to ask me.
Thanks,
Matej Michalko
Founder, DECENT
Steem is Reddit website-like derivative that has been HARDFORKED a few times and is full of bots, misuse and pump & down. Moreover, most of their coins are in the hands of their team. Alexandria is a not well founded, easily destroyable ALLOY of various, not that well working together, “crypto” technologies. DECENT has a STRONG DEV TEAM, is quickly growing and its the WORLD’S FIRST crypto project that has great chances to do succeed both in China and in the West. As you can see they have already STRONG PARTNERS on board, that is a sort of guarantee of initial support. Unlike SYNEREO, those guys have well founded reasons to succeed, not just empty words.
Nice introduction to these platforms. I hadn’t looked into Decent closely but I will now. Once these projects are out of alpha and beta it will be fascinating to see how they might be made to interact with each other through some kind of transport layer.
Thanks for this article Dean. I’m more on the content creation side of the equation and not terribly technical, so your comparison has been extremely helpful. I look forward to more of your posts.
Just to be clear, (today, 20160823) this is a topic of urgency to many of us,
and your article is a very good starting point (the very best I have seen, which is not saying too much ;^)
I spun through the offerings you mention
(I have already run CJDNS, Freenet, Retroshare and am still trying to find time to examine Morphis)
Your list inspired me to make the rounds:
Alexandria
http://www.alexandria.io/ opens up to an utterly blank screen with nothing more than cryptic “send us a message” button (click.. …clisk… …click… …clisk… no whirr – silence)
Decent
http://decent.ch/ is awaiting a massive sales event before they can even mention being in existence.
The concept (white paper) looks nice and stands casual scrutiny, but the implementation on the other hand…?
Did they mention the premine ? ( for fun and extra credit, ask the folks at Decent about the Steemit premine, )
Maidsafe
http://maidsafe.net/ is still slowly slogging along
the muddy path of REINVENTING EVERY _single_ SHRED OF THE ENTIRE INTERNET,
but it appears they may actually arrive intact before anyone else (except Zeronet).
There will be no way to access the Safe network without installing a new engine inside your pc.
But it will -absolutely- work as sold, the development is topnotch ‘out in the open’ “here it is” look at it.
Steemit
https://steemit.com/ exists and works very well, but “here be dragons”:
(Ask them about the DECENT premine, just for fun)
Posting on Steemit is like using postit notes stuck on the side of a urban transit bus to sell your house – the attention span there is measured in minnow-seconds.
And has all the look and post-lobotomy feel of swimming in a cesspool of mental facebook narcissisms flushed down a hospital septic drain (no, I did Not write “in Rio”).
You can get more cerebral content browsing craigslist or Amazon than will ever be seen on Steemit.
Synereo
https://www.synereo.com/ is preparing to capture the entire “Attention Economy” once they do whatever it is they are doing to implement the “Protocols within Synereo are implemented in contracts executed against a concurrent virtual machine (VM) !!! RUNNING ON YOUR DEVICE !!!, in full communication with the blockchain. This means that the state of the VM is logged on the blockchain, and all resources – from execution steps to storage – are metered, priced, and valued. “.
Putting time-triggered contract software inside your pc may eventually be recognized to be a very daft way of syncing your calendar to malware schedules.
DAO hack, redux
Zeronet
https://zeronet.io/ works well,
but there is no current way to subsidize activities there,
and it needs to be installed – it is not something you can just drive up to and use like Steemit
Hope this helps until you get time to revisit it with a more nuanced perception (I hold very jaded views)