Member: Decentralized Twitter alternative, uncensorable, open source

I&#x27;m curious how uncensorable this really is. If there&#x27;s no moderation and there are posts violating FOSTA&#x2F;SESTA, I&#x27;m pretty sure someone is going to be having a talk with their domain registrar at minimum.<p>They&#x27;re running on AWS (ask Parler how that&#x27;s working out) and their contact is a gmail address, this seems like the opposite of uncensorable.<p>Their github repo mentions &quot;A host with good capacity and DDOS protection would be helpful to the project,&quot; which I&#x27;m assuming means it&#x27;s also extremely vulnerable to DDOS.

&quot;Run it against your Bitcoin Cash Node to process Memo transactions into a database.&quot;<p>Since the protocol of this is based on inscribing transactions into the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, that means posting content will cost transaction fees. In this case, it seems the server operator is expected to pay for that.<p>According to bitcoinfees.cash it&#x27;s currently at $0.0025 per inscription.

Member.cash’s blockchain architecture completely eliminates the need for centralized hosting providers — at least for pure text short message data. It’s as impervious to censorship as the blockchain being used to directly store the short messages.<p>This is really quite a sensible approach for member.cash as it looks to gain a footing as a safe harbor for censored conservative voices.<p>Many are asking why not Mastodon. The “Member.cash” protocol could ship inside of a native desktop application which scans a general purpose blockchain <i>already on your computer</i> for embedded messages. Ideally this would be done with a thin client, so that nobody has to download terabytes of data.

What is the benefit of using a blockchain here? Why do you need distributed and decentralized consensus? I mean on the face of it this just makes no sense. What am I missing?<p>EDIT: IMO <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bitmessage" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Bitmessage</a> was a far superior alternative to this.

Why would anyone do a twitter clone that doesn&#x27;t support activitypub or at least ostatus these days?

Also it&#x27;s easy to run Member fully independently on a Windows desktop - download link (3.5GB)<p>magnet:?xt=urn:btih:E1E4C04EFEA99A16A992FEF7F8E8F3C5964E865E<p>It includes :<p>A pruned, fully synced Bitcoin Cash Node (Bitcoin Unlimited v1.9.0.1)<p>Member server, fully synced database<p>Member client<p>To run it, just unzip it, and run &#x27;install.bat&#x27;, it will install the node as a service and run the server in a window. To open the client, open &#x27;client&#x2F;index.html&#x27;.<p>That&#x27;s all. 100% sovereign social media, runs as long as Bitcoin Cash network stays up.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twetch.app" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twetch.app</a> is similar but more popular. Uncensorable isn&#x27;t the word I would use - the data is stored on the blockchain but the website is just like any other. The difference is instead of needing to &#x27;export&#x27; your data - it can be instantly accessed through the bitcoin network

I&#x27;ve read what I could here, but I&#x27;m still not clear on how this differs from Mastodon. Is it the web client?

name sounds super sketchy. Member cash? Sounds like you are making money from members.

how does this handle straight up illegal content? If someone uploads say, copyrighted material to the chain, who is voluntarily going to host an instance of this site?

The very first post I read on this community Home Screen is “I am sad”. Doesn’t paint a promising picture.

What are the costs to operating something like this that requires adding to the Bitcoin blockchain? And who pays? What would costs look like if it had 1,000,000 new posts at current prices, etc?

I love the concept but how do we protect against spammers?<p>“Want to earn $1000 a month browsing the internet???”

This can&#x27;t be the first decentralised twitter clone, can it?

pretty good but needs a better UI