What is Decentium?

"Decentium is a decentralized publishing and tipping platform where authors own their content and earn money and exposure through endorsements."

That's what it says on the box, but what does it mean? Let's break it down:

Decentralized publishing

You can think of Decentium as a self-publishing tool rather than a traditional platform, to publish you have to invest a small number of resources. These are resources you own and control, if you unpublish articles the resources will be released again and you can sell them back to the market.

These resources is what pays the distributed network to host your content and manage the platform.

What are these resources?

Decentium operates on the EOS blockchain. To use it you need an account, staked resources and storage. These are called NET, CPU & RAM.

NET & CPU is what pays for the time and bandwidth you use when you interact with the blockchain, e.g. when you publish on Decentium you need to upload your post (NET) and it needs to be processed (CPU). This resource you get by staking EOS tokens (freezing them for 48 hours) and as long as you keep them staked you will be allotted resources on a daily basis.

RAM is where things are stored on EOS, your account data like your public keys and token balances are stored there. This is also where Decentium stores reference to your posts and profile info. This resource is tradable, you can buy and sell it for EOS tokens on the RAM market.

When you buy an EOS account it usually comes with enough resources to get started.

Who is hosting my content?

In effect, you are, since you are the one paying for it. But the computers serving the content to you and your readers are run by block producers, crypto-currency exchanges and enthusiasts all over the world.

We encourage you to check out the Node Selector in the footer of this page to pick a node close to you for the fastest experience.

But decentium.org is a website, how is that decentralized?

We do run a classic web server hosting decentium.org, but all that server does is send you the JavaScript application that connects to the EOS network. You can just as easily download and run it locally or use the version hosted on the interplanetary filesystem.

We are always looking at alternative ways of delivering the application (EOS DNS is looking promising) but the bottom line is that as long as you have an Internet connection there will always be a way to read articles published on Decentium.

Tips and visibility through endorsements

Alongside Decentium's publishing system we run an endorsement system. This system is what creates the topic and trending feeds you see on the site, it is also what allows readers to encourage authors they like with money and visibility.

In addition to endorsements, the system allows authors to make strong links between posts using what we call linkbacks.

What happens when someone endorses my article?

When someone endorses you they do it by sending EOS to the Decentium smart contract which in turn forwards 70% directly to your EOS account and updates the trending feeds to increase the position of your article. The feeds use an algorithm similar to Reddit but weighted by endorsement amounts instead of upvotes.

The remaining 30% is the platform fee that goes towards the blockchain resources needed to maintain the trending feeds and development costs.

How do the linkbacks work?

Linkbacks are paid links between articles that lets you reference another article and reward the author who wrote it. In return, you get a link from their article. This link can be featured or hidden by the receiver but not removed.

The distinction between the two systems

Decentium is built with a clear boundary between the publishing system and the endorsement system. The publishing system is 100% in user RAM with content untouchable by anyone but the author. The endorsement system is 100% in contract RAM and voluntary to use. If you do use it you are bound by its Terms of Service.

Will you make user-hostile changes to the Terms of Service as soon as you get popular just like all other platforms?

No! And the best part is that you don't have to take our word for it, the Terms of Service is integrated into the blockchain as a ricardian contract. The keys to update the contract will be handed to prominent community members and block producers and it will require a majority vote to be updated.

Will you censor content?

We will deny usage of the endorsement system to users who break our Terms of Service which could be seen as a form of censorship since posts by those users can not appear in the trending feeds. But individual blogs and posts are owned and hosted by users and can not be changed by us.

Decentium and your privacy

These days you hear the word privacy wherever you turn and every company assigns it a different meaning. To Apple it means protecting your data from everyone, including them, to Google it means protecting your data from competitors and to Facebook it means nothing.

To us privacy means that we don’t collect any data whatsoever. You may have noticed that we don’t have any cookie consent or privacy policy on decentium.org. That’s not an oversight, it’s because we don’t need them. You choose what information you post publicly to the blockchain everything else stays with you.

FAQ

When Airdrop/ICO?

There is no current plans on creating a token for Decentium as we believe a token wouldn’t add any value to our system at this point. The EOS token offers enough programmability for our needs and already has a big market.

How is this different from Steem/Steemit?

Besides Decentium being a platform focused on journalists and writers where Steem is more of a Facebook with public feeds, it uses an inflation-based token. That inflation goes into a rewards pool that token holders distribute by voting for content.

That model while it has seen some success also leads to a lot of contention, people looking for handouts and clever spammers trying to siphon off as much as possible from the rewards pool. Those costs are not immediately apparent to the users who ultimately have to shoulder them.

The reward pool model also has a big drawback: You can only earn rewards on a piece of content for the first week it exists.

On Decentium you can receive endorsements for as long as your content is published. We believe our model lends itself much better to long-form content and allows authors to earn passive income from a body of work.

How is this different from Voice?

That’s too early to say, Voice still has many unknowns but from what little we know it looks to be using a very similar rewards model to Steem.

Does Decentium store content on-chain?

Yes, text content is stored on the chain with media being URLs to e.g. IPFS.

Is Decentium open-source?

Yes, we will release the contract source when we leave beta and the web-application source as soon as we feel we have the first mover advantage.

Keep an eye on our GitHub page, we have already released some libraries and standalone services for interacting with Decentium.

Can I integrate my app or website with Decentium?

Yes, all content on Decentium is accessible to anyone.

Do I need an EOS node with full history or some other indexer to access my posts?

No, all you need is a node running the chain_plugin. No indexers or other services needed.

In your introduction post you spoke of decentralizing the organization, when DAO?

Our goal is to build a self-sustaining organization that stays aligned with its users, a DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) is one path we can take but there are many design problems we need to solve before we get there so don’t expect it to happen anytime soon.

Why did you create Decentium?

Because we believe in the open web and freedom of expression.

Will Decentium fail if you don’t reach critical mass?

Decentium already has the mass needed to be sustained going forward. Our running cost are nearly non-existent thanks to the self-publishing and decentralized structure of Decentium.

Got more questions? Hop into our Telegram group and we’d be happy to answer them.