Even better, imagine if opting-in to Creative Commons on Medium made the work available in a “commons database” that provided a single logical interface to CC media from multiple platforms.

Attribution could be programatically described, making it easy for users to give credit. Analytics on re-use could flow through the same channel, enabling “gratitude” to publishers in the form of likes, reblog, etc., across platform walls.

We recently published an article by Lance Koonce on the Mediachain Blog imagining how decentralized infrastructure (like the Mediachain protocol) can enable such a database to exist, while preserving the current structure of CC as a neutral advisory board: data remains with participating platforms, but can be shared across to improve discovery, attribution and analytics for creators and their audiences.

It’s only one hop to imagine how the same infrastructure could be used for social media published with a similar intent: to reach all the eyeballs on the open internet.

This post about a viral David Bowie GIF gets at that user story and how decentralized protocols like Mediachain make it possible to improve cross-platform sharing as RSS and other open protocols did before it.