Getting close to Communities Release!

I’ve been working hard on getting communities up and running on the Stratos network, and have a few announcements pertaining to that. But first, here’s a review of the progress and changes that have been made to Stratos since grant distribution was added.

First, I’ve switched the default API node to connect to to get Steem blockchain data for a Stratos node to be rpc.usesteem.com, a full community run node by @themarkymark rather than api.steemit.com, which is run by Steemit Inc. This change aligns with Stratos’ vision, an active Steem blockchain development environment without depending on Steemit Inc.

I’ve also been working very hard on an upcoming Communities implementation. I believe communities are integral to increasing Steem engagement and curation and are the future of Steem. So far what has been implemented is the creation of communities as well as the ability to give people roles such as Owner, Admin, Moderator, and Author. Also, you can give any role to the account @eo to let anyone have that role’s permissions. This is the bulk of the work on creating transactions on-chain but there is still some work on creating an efficient, cached server that hosts the actual communities data for high performance sites. Getting very close to releasing communities on Steem!

Also, on a similar note, the Stratos network will launch with only one feature activated: communities. Since all other features grant distribution and decentralized exchange are all related to the SRTS token, as long as there are no SRTS tokens in circulation at the beggining there will be no way to interact with these other subapps. There are many reasons why I’m not releasing the Stratos token at the beginning, such as:

• Releasing the token would require a myriad of interfaces to be built at launch, which would delay launch and slow down progress (I’m not very good at building UIs)
• I’m still figuring out what the supply will be, how it will be distributed, etc and am not sure the best method right now.
• There’s no reason that the SRTS token will have value or use meaning its launch will be meaningless except for speculation, which contradicts its goal to be a utility token rather than a security.

So Stratos will be launching only as a communities implementation with the ability to activate a SRTS cryptocurrency as soon as the need arises by changing a few lines of code.

Also, Stratos communities will be much more secure than Hivemind communities as they have built-in consensus by running on Stratos. In Hivemind, if there is an error in the communities node that brings some nodes out of consensus, there is no effective way to tell. Even a small change in whether a role grant transaction is accepted and counted or not can snowball into completely changing the posts, state, and name of each community. To stop this from happening, in Stratos, every 10 minutes, every node in the network posts a check that their current state is the same as everyone else’s, and posting for the public to see if there are nodes who are consistently not doing their job correctly, allowing an easy check of whether all nodes are in consensus or not.

Stratos nodes have been designed to not USE_WAY_TOO_MUCH_RAM and, based on my calculations, bear the full load of current posts and large amounts of requests while only using less than 4 GB of memory (my computations actually showed more like 1 GB), with the ability to scale continuously to sacrifice more memory (used for more caching) for better performance. These improvements mean that anyone will be able to run a full Stratos node on their home computer, maybe even being able to handle APIs and high amounts of requests.

I’ll be continuing to work on implementing the full Communities subapp which will include Trending, Featured, and New pages as well as hopefully the ability to follow a community’s Featured page. I’m also starting to contact interfaces on integrating this in the future.

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