A few weeks ago Bitcoin Magazine published a report on the launch of AKASHA , a blockchain-based social network built on top of Ethereum and IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System).
As a followup to the previous report, AKASHA CEO Mihai Alisie spoke to Bitcoin Magazine and said that the idea behind creating a blockchain-based social network came to him and his team as they were looking for ways to use existing technologies such as Ethereum and IPFS to solve bigger problems.
The team eventually decided to select the issue of internet censorship as the problem to tackle, and the best way to address the issue, according to Alisie, was to build a better channel of expression in the form of a decentralized publishing platform.
“It started with the search for a really big problem that could be solved now that we have technologies like Ethereum and IPFS. This is how I ended up picking internet censorship as the problem to tackle and I figured that the best way to do it is by building a better channel of expression in the form of a decentralized publishing platform,” Alisie said.
Talking about censorship and how popular social media networks fail to uphold the idea of freedom of expression, Alisie said that the centralized architecture of popular social networks puts them in a situation where complying with censorship laws and regulations becomes necessary for them to stay in business.
“I am not implying that there’s necessarily some sort of evil agenda at play here, but we have seen numerous times how established companies have to comply with certain requests if they want to stay in business,” Alisie wrote in a blog post. "It just so happens that some of those requests involve censorship, and the root problem here is the information architecture used. This centralized architecture […]
