AKASHA is a true peer-to-peer social media app, built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and using IPFS (Internet Protocol File System) for storage. By true peer to peer, I mean that the app is everything you need to post, browse and curate. There's no web server to host the UI. You download an app and you're connected.

Yesterday AKASHA rolled out the 0.3.0 alpha version, which aims at fixing a few bugs and introduces an experimental feature, the whisper-based chat. Since I didn't get the edge to make a review when AKASHA was first launched ( @clayop and another steemian posted their reviews very fast) I decided to do it now. Also, when AKASHA was first launched, the founders clearly indicated they don't want screenshots and reviews, which I hope it's not the case anymore. Please keep in mind this is a sneak-preview, the official release wasn’t published it, it will be available next week.

Startup Screen

The startup screen has 2 important static indicators and a dynamic one. The two static (on/off) indicators are showing the connection status with the 2 networks you need to run AKASHA: theEthereum blockchain and the IPFS network (which means AKASHA does install the IPFS daemon on your machine too). If one of those is red, it means you're not connected, if it's green, you're good to go. The dynamic (circular loader) indicator shows the synchronization status, or how many blocks from the Ethereum blockchain you need to process until you're up to date. Once everything is done, you're redirected to the account center screen.

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Identity Center

You can have many identities on the AKASHA network, so if you created more than one, you're directed to this screen (after AKASHA is fully synched), so you can choose whichever you want. Since I got in early, I thought it would be nice to have both "dragos" and "dragosroua" handlers.

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Login

An interesting add-on to a standard login interface is your Ethereum address. I think it's the address of the smart contract you create when you login. My understanding is that the entire AKASHA network is a stack of smart contracts interacting with each other. When you login, you can tell the app to remember your passphrase for a certain number of minutes. If you want to streamline your experience with AKASHA, I recommend you to pick the 30 minutes interval. At this moment, almost any operation in AKASHA needs to be signed, from posting, to commenting, upvoting or creating a new tag.

Also, for those asking if you get paid in AKASHA, the answer is not. Yet. From what I understood from the founder, they want to “take an experiment driven approach and test multiple token, identity and reputation models in the pursuit of the optimal solutions”. The Ether that you get right now in your account is from testnet, it's not a real token, so spend at your leisure. So basically, the existing tokenization is just a “scaffolding to experiment with bold ideas”.

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Browsing

After you logged in, this is the main interface. On the left side, there is a column with buttons for various functions (some of them disabled, since not all the features are rolled in, this is an alpha). On the right side there's a list of tags you want to follow. You can "subscribe" to a tag (which is also an operation and it requires gas). This is where you consume a lot of your AKASHA experience.

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Single Entry

And that's how a single entry looks like. You get upvotes/downvotes and also comments.

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Profile Center

If you click the top icon of your avatar, you'll get your profile related screen. Notifications are enabled by default for 3 sections: feed, you and messages. I don't think "messages" works now, it may be integrated in the future with the whisper-based chat (see bellow). On the "feed" you see the activity of the people you follow, on "you", there's info about who followed or upvoted you.

If you click on the topmost right button, you will get access to your profile page. You can customize the avatar and the background image or add relevant links for your persona.

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Posting Center

I don't know if it's called like that, that's how I called the screen you get when you click on the button underneath the avatar. In this screen you have a list of your drafts, a list of what you already published and a list of the articles which you unlisted (are not publicly visible).

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Whisper-based Chat

The most important feature in this alpha release seems to be the integration of a whisper-based chat. To access it, click the last button on the left bar. Being based on whisper, it means the messages will be gone after 48 hours.

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Discovering People

The button above the chat gives you the "people" screen. Here you can discover new people (so far only by showing the latest members), you can see who's following you and who do you follow.

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Providing Feedback

So far, the AKASHA team was very responsive and very customer centric. If you observe something that's not right, you can report an issue directly on the Github page. Neat!

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All in all, AKASHA shines at the user interface level and it shows a steady development pace. I'm very curious to see what will happen down the road.

Some stuff takes a long time to load, but I don't consider this to be a bug at this time.

So far, I couldn't break anything in AKASHA 0.3.0, which is kind of unusual for an alpha version.

Disclaimer: I don't see AKASHA as a competitor to Steemit and I don't see Steemit as a competitor to AKASHA. Although both experiments are taking place in the blockchain industry, I think each of them is serving a different purpose. We can learn way better if we expose each other to various approaches in an effort to collectively evolve, rather than maintaining ourselves in a crab mentality. For more details about a tentative roadmap of AKASHA and its vision, check out this exclusive interview with AKASHA's founder, Mihai Alisie.

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I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.

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