Hi everyone. Late night yesterday (and some of today morning as well), https://steemit.com was offline due to a purported DDOS attack on the website. However, because STEEM runs on a blockchain, the underlying database is always online; the challenge is simply to find ways to access it. How can we access STEEM's blockchain (for posting, commenting, curating, etc) while Steemit.com is down?
This post explores several alternatives including Busy.org, ChainBB, eSteem, SteemDB, and Steem Developer Beta (a secret little-known feature). Let's dive in.
Steem Developer Beta Website
A little known fact about Steemit is their developer beta website, located at https://steemitstage.com. It was created 2 months ago by the developer team (see this post), and is still running very well.
Steemit Stage is like a mirror to Steemit.com, and looks/runs pretty much exactly the same. There may be some underlying beta code/features, but one of the best parts is that during a DDOS attack, Steemit Stage is generally perfectly online. The catch is that very few people know about it (including the attacker himself/herself).
Korean Steem
For our Koreans, https://steemkr.com is another Steemit alternative with the same interface as Steemit, except most of the words are written in Korean. It still, however, provides a good look into the blockchain; additionally, you can access your normal STEEM accounts from SteemKR.
Busy.org Online Website
https://busy.org is an online website very similar to Steemit.com. However, it has its own developer team separate from Steemit Inc. (though they do collaborate sometimes), and a radically different UI/interface.
Busy.org is a nice alternative to Steemit when the latter is down, and is also a nice standalone website to use by itself.
ChainBB Forum-Style Website
ChainBB also uses the STEEM blockchain, but categorizes posts like an online forum. Each post's main tag determines what "forum" or "thread" it's placed into, and this allows for a very different post structure/organization.
The interface of ChainBB, as you can see to the left, uses the top navigation bar for your account picture and rewards, and uses a left sidebar for navigating the forums. This different style provides contrast to what we've seen on other websites.
Something to know about ChainBB is, however, that they take a mandatory 15% cut on all of your author rewards for posts/articles, though this doesn't apply to comments.
eSteem Mobile App (iOS/Android)
eSteem is a mobile app for Android and iOS devices, developed by fellow Steemian @good-karma. It's a full-featured app with everything from posting/curating to fund transfers.
One of the cool parts about using eSteem are the loyalty rewards. If you use the eSteem app to post a comment or article with enough non-spam content, @good-karma and @esteemapp (and a few other accounts) will bestow you a few free small upvotes that, in total, can add up to about $0.30.
However, it should be noted that using eSteem gives @esteemapp a 5% cut on all of your author rewards.
The loyalty rewards generally add up to about $0.30, 25% of which is given to curators, so when you do the math, if your post is worth less than $4.50 you generally make a profit from using eSteem, and even if it's higher, it feels good to give back some profit to the developer @good-karma for future development :)
SteemDB Blockchain Explorer
Lastly, is SteemDB. It's not a full-featured website or client like the ones listed above, but does allow you to monitor your account for activity such as votes or comments, so you can get a quick overview at what's going on.
You can see that the layout is remarkably similar to that of ChainBB. This website is also very similar to SteemD, my other favorite blockchain explorer, except SteemD is sometimes down for maintenance.
All of these clients/websites/apps provide useful ways to interact with STEEM while https://steemit.com is down. Many of them are interesting/useful even when Steemit is up, so I highly recommend you check them out :)
Thanks for reading,
— @mooncryption
announcement #1: @mooncryption is now on other social media! Use the buttons at the right to find our various social media pages from Steemit to Facebook to Twitter!
announcement #2: New Steemit Banner! If you've noticed my new banner, you've probably noticed the amazing design / graphics that went into it. All of this was done by @zord189, and as you can tell, he's very good at this! If any of you want a banner like this, I highly recommend @zord189. You can contact him on Discord (@zord189#1776) to chat.