Akasha , a next-generation social media network powered by Ethereum and the InterPlanetary File System, was unveiled on May 3 ‒ World Press Freedom Day . The signups for the alpha release are open. The project is the brainchild of Mihai Alisie , cofounder of Bitcoin Magazine .
The Akasha, a Sanskrit word, is the unseen medium that pervades the universe and, in Eastern religions and spiritual traditions, serves as a substrate for the “Akashic Records” ‒ a permanent repository embedded in the fabric of space-time for all the information that is ever produced in the universe. Alisie’s project doesn’t go that far yet: it just wants to establish a permanent repository embedded in the fabric of the Internet for all the information that is ever produced online.
“Ever since I joined Vitalik [Buterin] in the Ethereum project as cofounder in late 2013, I’ve dreamed about the ways Ethereum could be used to solve some of the biggest issues we face as a civilization,” says Alisie. “However, it wasn’t until early 2015 when I first realized that we are about to create the missing puzzle piece that will enable us to tackle two of the most important challenges we face today as a modern information-based society: freedom of expression and creative perpetuity.”
The problem that the Akasha project wants to solve is the impermanence of information online. Information ‒ web sites, documents, email archives, video, etc. ‒ can be either purposefully deleted by the governments and/or corporations that control today’s Internet, or, more simply but equally tragic, just disappear for lack of maintenance of the central servers where it’s hosted.
In fact, today’s Internet is becoming centralized, with billions of users dependent on a handful of large services. Today’s Internet is also fragile, because it relies on a centralized distribution model, with servers […]
