A few months ago, I added the ability to see which websites were being used to create posts I was reading to the website fork of Ecency. Every time you post, the software of the site you are using will share what site you are using in the metadata of your post. This is information the site posts to the blockchain which isn't part of the main text but can be accessed by software that is setup to do so.

A pattern appeared in the results. Predicting which site was used in a random post was similar to that of flipping a coin. You could liken heads to ecency.com, tails to peakd.com and everything else was like the coin landing on it's edge.

Running Ecency on your computer

I was able to do all of these steps on a computer with only 8 GB of RAM. There is more work done by an RPC server and Ecency's private API server. This software you'll run will be a web-server which your browser will use to bring everything together.

The Easy way

We have a market driven duopoly of sites. It is not to say that these two sites did something unfair or untoward but it does make them an easy target from say DNS attacks or attacks on the sites themselves.

In order to mitigate problems you could be faced with in the future. I suggest you download the Ecency.app available at https://github.com/ecency/ecency-vision/releases just in case.

It also is important you get the LBRY app, and PocketNet app. These are programs that run on your computer and do not require access to a particular website to work. It is okay not to be dependent on a particular network.

The Flexible Customised Way

It turns out you can use the Ecency source code to make changes for taste or things that you might find lacking. If you think you have some ideas you would like to try, this is one way to do things.

First you should get on git and navigate to the ecency account on github.com. You'll find the source code for the website here. You can create your own account and create a fork. Then you can download from your fork from Github using SSH keys so you can upload your fork and possibly get your changes into ecency.com.

Second, flip over to console and checkout with the clone command but use your own github account name in place of 'steemfiles' here:
git clone ssh://git@github.com/steemfiles/ecency-vision
cd ecency-vision

Third, you'll probably need to update node as the distros often have out of date versions of node and yarn. Do that and install the dependencies

yarn
export USE_PRIVATE=1

Now build and run:

yarn build
node build/server.js

Now if you ran these on your computer. You can now surf an Ecency like front end at http://localhost:3000.

For changing the source code and rapidly running with live changes being updated as you use it:

yarn start

You might want to switch from time to time to use:

yarn test