Decensored — Andromeda Release
Andromeda Release
After more than two weeks of committed development, Decensored is finally back.
Today we invite you to our Andromeda Release, which introduces many exciting new features:
- We can form communities around shared interests in our new “Spaces”.
- We can now reply to posts to have real in-depth conversations
- We can blacklist people to prevent them from posting in our spaces.
- We can recover our accounts with our account’s private keys.
- We can sign in with our smartphones simply by scanning a QR code.
- We can finally relax our eyes by switching into dark mode.
- We control which Decensored we connect to in our new settings dialogue.
- We have clarity when something doesn’t work thanks to error messages.
- We can fend-off spam by requiring sign-up tokens.
- We finally have a reliably running protocol after switching to hardhat.
- We have an entirely new front-end written in React from scratch.
Team
First off, a little update on who is currently building Decensored. Over the past weeks three developers jumped in to develop together with microhash. Those three developers are:
All developers have been deeply involved building over the past few weeks. The Andromeda update would never been possible without the help of every single developer.
Decensored is a decentralized open-source project and everyone is invited to jump in and contribute in whatever way they can! If you want to contribute, join our Discord: https://discord.gg/HAyFKPau …
Anyways, here are the updates:
Spaces
For the most important feature of the Andromeda release, we took inspiration from Reddit’s subreddits. Spaces are niche communities formed around specific topics. At the core of each space is a community that shares an interest. Everybody will now be able to create new spaces.
It is our conviction that communities are the building blocks of society and a crucial part of each of our lives. We humans must belong to and rely on communities. Communities must therefore be protected from control by any centralized entity, especially for-profit corporations. This is exactly how we can use Decensored to take our communities to the next level.
Replies
The initial release of Decensored felt more like one single big chat. That impression was created by a linear stream of messages, one after another. With the Andromeda release we can now reply to posts. And we can even reply to replies. Again we took inspiration from Reddit. We are excited to see how this will impact the depth and quality of conversation in our spaces.
Blacklisting
Communities must be protected from people taking advantage of them. We must deny people access if they have bad intentions. With the new blacklisting feature, space owners can now ban spammers and trolls from their spaces to create a safe and well-moderated space for their community.
Hardhat Node
Because the IOTA EVM node is still very new, it does not yet run reliably enough to use. It regularly crashed after moderate activity, making it a huge pain to use Decensored. We decided to switch to a hardhat node to allow us to continue building Decensored while the IOTA Foundation works on a more stable IOTA EVM node. Fortunately since the IOTA EVM node is EVM-compatible, the switch back from hardhat to the IOTA EVM will be easy and not require any changes to Decensored.
Sign-up Tokens
As a measure to prevent spammers from using scripts to overload the node with too much activity or making moderation impossible by spam-creating accounts, we introduce sign-up tokens. Sign-up tokens act as tickets to create an account on the protocol.
Sign-up tokens currently are given out by us, so for the time-being our onboarding process is centralized. It’s a great solution for now to fend-off spammers. Yet eventually we want to decentralize how tokens are given out to move closer to our vision of full decentralization.
If you want to try the new Andromeda release, you will need to request sign-up tokens from us:
- Join our Discord https://discord.gg/tqBAUSm2
- Ask for a token in the #signup-tokens channel
- Use that token to sign up on https://decensored.app
