Dan Larimer’s newest project is another attempt at decentralized social media
Daniel Larimer, former chief technology officer of Block.one and a co-founder of Block.one and Steemit, has revealed his next project, called Clarion.
The project is meant to become a mobile-first decentralized social media platform, supporting all types of social features like personal messaging via text and video, publishing content to followers or having Discord-like voice chat rooms.
Larimer’s idea of a better network draws more from RetroShare and Zeronet, two platforms based on peer-to-peer messaging, with the latter based on BitTorrent. He also cited file sharing protocols like IPFS as good examples of decentralized networks. These present usability challenges though, especially on mobile devices.
Clarion’s blockchain-related aspects are somewhat less clear, as Larimer described it as not needing to reach consensus on the order of user actions, thus making it a “layer 0” platform. WebAssembly plugins will still allow building applications on top of the “Clarion OS.” Larimer clarified that there will be no tokens associated with the project’s base functionality.
Awesome.
Short of making something directly on Hive, this is the best thing we could have hoped for really. @dan is creating something for everyone, as is showcased by the lack of an underlying token. Very smart move: takes all the questions of greed and skepticism right out of the equation.
The key to crypto obviously lies in the original peer-to-peer technology: Torrents. I'm glad to see this is being incorporated here. Very exciting developments.
... avoid the reliance on native applications distributed through app stores, with Larimer noting that “recent actions by Google, Amazon, and Apple have demonstrated that we cannot rely on app stores and hosting providers to distribute our applications and content.”
Again, spot on!
This is something I've thought about at length. Say if I create a gambling dapp and try to launch it on the Play Store. That's obviously going to be removed before many people can download it. Distribution has to be decentralized. Anyone will be able to use a system like this to distribute the tech in a decentralized manner with torrents. This is valuable to the entire cryptoverse.
Double Trouble
I now feel like Hive has two entities on its side working in parallel to create open source tech. Project Clarion has a lot of promise. Koinos is also working on open source modular tech that Hive can use. Both of these entities have extensive knowledge of the Hive ecosystem and may find themselves catering to our network. I couldn't ask for more.