Recently a lot of new members have been joining Steemit because the blockchain offers a form of 'censorship free' social media that cannot be found on other social media sites. While other social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) are taking down posts related to 'fake news' and other hot-topic items - we are welcoming it!
I wanted to mention one thing that some of the new members may not be aware of though. Pictures that are added to your posts are not saved in the blockchain. The blockchain will store the link to the picture, but not the picture itself.
The companies that want to censor can go after the sites that are hosting the images (including Steemit, Inc.) to have them removed, but they will have a much more difficult time trying to get them actually removed from the blockchain.
What this means is that if you are planning to use the Steem blockchain to store your important research/content/data/etc. which may be subject to censorship - make sure that whatever you need permanently saved is posted as text.
I suggest using ipfs.pics to host your pictures in a decentralized way.
Where is the actual file stored with ipfs.pics?
Thanks for the tip. I haven't looked into it myself, but it sounds like members should check it out!
Nice man cheers for the link :)
Very good tip. Thank you.
How is it a good thing that other sites are taking down fake news but Steemit allows the posting of false and ignorant news? One of the reasons I'm rarely on Steemit these days is due to the proliferation of wacky posts, fear mongering, and Dollar Vigilante's crap. I've already come across three different Pizzagate posts and a slew of other nonsense in my attempt to find accurate political reporting from a seasoned journalist or activist.
Without getting into the specifics of any particular topic, one of the benefits of Steemit vs. the 'other social media sites' is that there is not a central company (like Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, etc.) that gets to decide what is allowed and what is not. Yes, it does open up the doors to a lot of garbage posts, but it also has the potential to produce a lot of content that cannot be found elsewhere on the other social media sites.
It's a good thing because if someone posts child porn, it doesn't actually get saved to the steem blockchain. If it did, you could destroy steem overnight with a child porn attack.
Btw pizzagate is real.
The thing that is disappointing about this is if/when the site that you are using to host all of your images goes belly-up, or otherwise out of commission. If that should happen, then I assume all the images on my many Steemit posts go simultaneously dark. Yikes!!!
I know that https://postimage.org/ alluded to maybe becoming insolvent a month or two ago. Looks like they worked out some kind of deal to stay in business.
Yes!
Steemit does help to protect against this, but it is not as 'safe' as the data actually stored in the blockchain.
I am not 100% up on how it all works, but I am pretty sure that when you create a post on Steemit.com - Steemit does import the image into their servers. You will notice that when you right click on the images inside of posts, they actually all have a Steemit.com link. They could be forced to take the images down though, so it is not really considered 'safe'.
The blockchain stores the original link to the image, but not the image itself. Like you said, if the image hosting site goes away - then the images are gone.
Thanks @timcliff. It would be interesting to write a script to traverse the Steem blockchain, since its inception, and tally the list of unique image hosting sites used by the entire Steemit community.
Then, someone could perform a risk assessment to see where we stand. This sounds like something that should get some priority investigation.
It wouldn't be good for Steemit if something like this happened and there was a hodge-podge of posts that have broken image links.
I'm also not a guru on how all this blockchain technology works under the hood. So if images were persisted on the blockchain, I wonder how that would affect witness nodes? That is, would each node have to store the entirety of the blockchain contents? If so, then how many tera/peta bytes would it take to store all the associated images from all the Steemit posts for all time? And then you also have to contend with video!
With the current way the blockchain is programmed, it would have to store everything - which would not be scalable if it had to store images, videos, etc.
They are looking into alternate ways to support it in the future though.
Thank you very much for posting this valuable information.
Cheers!
I heard steemit will be hosting images soon. So no need to use a 3rd party.
Will those images be secure?
Steemit does have a GitHub issue to allow the upload of images via the posting editor. The images would be hosted by Steemit, Inc. though - and would not be stored on the blockchain. Unfortunately, Steemit itself is subject to the same potential of censorship that many of the other large social media companies are. It is really the storage of the content on the blockchain that makes it different. Even if they were to somehow 'take down' Steemit - the content would all still be there as long as there were other sites/tools that could interact with and run the blockchain.