Introducing Decentium

Today we are very happy to announce the first public beta of Decentium – a decentralized publishing platform that tries to align the incentives between author, reader and platform in a fair and transparent way. To participate in the beta you need an EOS account. If you already have one you can sign in directly, if not check the create account page for information on how to get an account. Or if you just want to take the beta for a spin you can use our testnet version that has free accounts.

How it works

When you publish on Decentium you pay a small fee to the blockchain for the resources used to distribute and host your content. The fact that you shoulder the costs for publishing (less than $0.1 per post at the time of writing) is the core of this platform and allows it to run without advertisements, paywalls and data-harvesting.

On top of this we have built a tipping and exposure system that allows readers to reward authors they enjoy reading both monetarily and with exposure. This system also allows authors to pay for referencing other authors content giving exposure to both in the process.

This system is our business model, we take a fee on every transaction made in it. Note that this system is voluntary, you can use Decentium both as an author and reader without participating. It is our hope, however, that you will want to and enable us to fund further development of the platform.

We will be publishing a more in-depth and technical article about the system in the near future.

Our motivation

We believe that universal freedom of expression is a human right that makes the world a better place. Our mission is to enable professional authors and journalists to be independent and build networks of trust with each other and their readers. Eliminating complexity and noise from long-form content on the Internet.

Decentrali-what?

Decentralization is a buzzword that gets thrown around a lot these days, many projects sport the “decentralized” badge simply for having a blockchain component even though they rely on many traditional – and often costly – servers to keep running. For us, being decentralized means that if we disappear and stop paying the bills the platform will still be running and accessible.

All interactions with Decentium happens through public servers distributed across the world run by block producers, exchanges and enthusiast who all have incentives to keep the network running. You could even run your own personal node and access the platform through that. Check out the node selector in the footer of this page.

The web application you're using right now to pull content from those servers is also built to be decentralized and is available on the interplanetary filesystem (IPFS) as well as several static hosting services. Or you can download and run your own local copy.

Looking ahead

Short term we want to shore up the software, squash bugs and improve the user experience. Longer term we want to explore ways to enable authors to gain trust in a systemic and hard to game way (i.e. tackling “fake news”) as well as decentralize the business part of our organization.

Feel free to contact us if you are interested in what we are doing or have feedback, contact details in the footer.

World peace,
The Decentium team