Blogging on the Neblio Blockchain with VE NFT
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Decentralised Publishing on the Neblio Blockchain Platform
Centralised Blogging and Social Media Platforms
When you think blogging, you think of platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, Squarespace, Tumblr and of course not forgetting Medium itself is also a great choice since it is our preferred option for getting Neblio related news and stories out to the world. Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are also used to publish content and provides an opportunity for building a community of like minded people, around your posting activity.
One thing all these platforms have in common (apart from their great editing tools and blogging experience which cannot be doubted, as they are popular for good reason) is the fact that they are centralised where control over the content you publish, is not totally in your hands. Your personal information could also be mined and passed on to third parties, including government agencies. Since many of these platforms are free to use, your data is pretty much used as a kind of payment for using these services.
Needless to say, that every author/blogger writing on these sites, must abide by the rules set out by the site creators. One could argue that is fair enough, as they are owned by entities who have funded and built them up using their own or investor given funds and are offering a free service to the public. Users will need to work within the established rules as breaking them could see their content deleted, writing privileges removed temporarily, or for worse breaches, a ban or suspension from using the platform altogether.
On signing up to these centralised platforms, users must read, acknowledge and accept the terms for which the services are being offered. Upon doing so, the user is entering into a contract so for as long as they are publishing content using such platforms they will not fall foul of the rules and so content will be moderated, usually automatically using certain algorithms and filters. In some cases, words and sentences that are deemed to be inappropriate or offensive could trigger an automatic suspension and a notice sent to the user informing them about the offense.
Anonymous Blogging Platforms
There are alternatives to the most popular and commonly used centralized blogging and social media platforms and those are offered by alternative sites, companies and orgamisations such as Telegra.ph (from the owners of Telegram) Notepin, Lyfster, Vent and others. These platforms enable bloggers to hide their personal info, without the need to sign up and can pretty much open the editor and begin blogging.
Usually posts published in these sites are still indexed by search engines as the owners permit search engine crawlers to do this, so while the user has some degree of privacy in that they are not sharing their personal info with the platform owners, their content is still searchable and can be found on search engines.
Also it is hard to know if there are backdoors written into these platforms, as we do not know the people behind them, and which third parties they may be in contact or collaboration with. Undoubtedly on the face of it, users get a higher level of privacy with anonymous blogging platforms, but some potential issues still remain.
Enter Blockchain Powered Content Publication
What does blockchain integration into social media and blogging platforms offer users? Let’s get the answers from VENFT itself.
Most of the activities on the internet are regulated, except Blockchain, which is a new technology that brings breakthrough innovation.
You cannot regulate it. You cannot change it. You cannot direct it. This brings an amazing new layer to the internet which gives you the freedom.
We decided to use the blockchain as a decentralized database for posting content similar to today’s social networks but without any regulations.
It is your space and you are responsible for the content you share.
In short, using the blockchain to securely store and distribute data and content, as a backend solution, offers the users advantages over both centralized and server based anonymous platforms. It achieves that by keeping stored text data on the blockchain as token metadata, with images and video content stored in IPFS.
Why Neblio?
With Blockchain we can offer you the solution where the database and all logic is on the blockchain. That’s why we do not need to run any servers and earn money on advertisements or selling any user data to 3rd parties. We believe that this new model of IT services is much superior than today’s model where people have a “free” service but their space is filled with advertisements because someone has to “pay the bills” for running centralized servers.
There are too many blockchains. But we think the Neblio is easy to use, it has its own token ecosystem (with metadata content) and it is very well prepared for scale. Also with friendly developers which helped us with the implementation. The gas fees are stable and very low. So it fits all our needs.
To sum up:
- No centralised servers
- No mining or selling of user data
- No moderation/deletion of your content by third parties
- You have full control and rights over your content
Example of a NFT Post Published on the Neblio Blockchain and How to Create One Yourself
The author can select the type of NFT they want to mint in their VE NFT Wallet. For NFT posts, they will need to select the second option, REUSABLE POST. Then it’s just a case of filling in the fields.
There is currently a basic text editor for authors to use for writing their post. A preview of how the post will appear when published is auto generated as you go along. HTML can be used to format text, add links, embed images and video. With a little bit of basic HTML, it’s more than possible to have a clean and professional looking post.
Tags can also be added which helps with indexing the posts within the platform, making them searchable by other users who are also using VE NFT, but not on search engines such as google, Bing, etc.
An image file can be uploaded to IPFS up to 10mb in size, which will be displayed along with the post title in the author’s VE NFT account.
Finally clicking on CREATE NFT will trigger a transaction (one VENFT token per post) and 0.0002 NEBL for the transaction fee.
Once the transaction has gone through, a NFT is minted, with the publication text/data and IPFS image link displaying in the token metadata on the Neblio blockchain!
The post itself will be located in the MY NFTs section of the VE NFT wallet. All NFTs are categorised so a NFT publication will have a small tag with the word POST written on it, denoting that it is a post and not an image or music NFT for example, which also have their own category tags, IMAGE and MUSIC.
Clicking on the i button brings up the post which should look the same as it did in the preview panel before publishing. Now let’s say the author was not happy with something but did not realize it at the time but has already published their content as a NFT. What if they wanted to change the formatting of the image in the post so that it is actually in the center of the page, rather than being justified to the left? Well, since these are reusable posts, it is possible to go back and make changes and then re-mint.
As the author and account holder, some options will be visible beneath the published post. Clicking on EDIT will open up the editor
In this case, let’s center the image, by adding the the < center > tag in the HTML code.
Confirm the changes, re-post and go back into the MY NFTs section, click on the post and there we are, the image is now in the center of the page!
If you would like to open and check out this NFT post yourself on your phone or computer, you can click here.
Why not try creating a NFT blog post of your own and share it with your friends and followers? Maybe start a decentralised blog on a certain topic, add a NEBL or DOGE address as a tip or donation jar so other VE NFT users can tip you some crypto!
Since VE NFT has support for DOGE and NEBL coins, account holders can start up a community based economy tipping for writing posts or buying NFT music and images. Start by creating a NFT profile and take it from there!
There is also NFT encrypted messaging within the wallet, kind of like a decentralized, encrypted email/messenger feature where users can communicate with each other which works quite well! We will cover more VE NFT features in future articles so stay tuned!
In the mean time, have a go writing your first decentralised post on Neblio. NFT publishing is here!