Akasha goes into public beta - A decentralized social network built on top of Ethereum and IPFS

Akasha is a decentralized social network built on top of Ethereum using Smart Contracts and IPFS and it just went into public beta today after a brief one week private beta period and a year long alpha period. Since it is built with Ethereum Smart Contracts which cost money to be run in the form of Ethereum Gas, using Akasha also costs money, but while in beta it runs on top of an Ethereum test blockchain and you are given 1 ETH and 1000 AETH for free to start.

You can read the very long and detailed beta announcement post on the Akasha blog here, installation instructions are at the bottom.

Or go directly to Github to download the Akasha app for Linux, Windows or macOS and try it out.

Akasha feels a lot like a combination of Tweetdeck and Medium. You have a multi column client similar to Tweetdeck or my Columns for Steem app which displays an image and a short excerpt from posts, but when you click on one you see a full article like you could write it on Medium or Steem. So while the app makes it look like Twitter, it's actually a lot more.

You can run the app in two modes, nomal or light. With the latter you don't have to download the entire blockchain to use the app, but it says that mode is very experimental, I've only tested the normal mode so far. Since it's an Ethereum test blockchain and not the real one, it's not too big yet so you won't have to download a giant blockchain for days.

Just like on Steem, if people upvote what you post you receive money on Akasha in the form of AETH, although not while it is in beta, the AETH tokens right now are just used for testing the system. There are a few different currencies used on Akasha, similar to Steem. You can find an overview on the Akasha blog:

The software is still in beta so there will be bugs according to the developers and at least in my own tests on macOS the app ran really rather slow which is why I haven't used it a lot yet even though I've been part of the private beta, the alpha and I think even earlier versions which looked quite different to the Tweetdeck style the app has now, hopefully the speed will improve over time as the app matures.

Now that the app is in public beta I'll spend a bit more time with it and maybe write a more in-depth overview here in a few weeks, it certainly is interesting technology although personally I think it will have a hard time competing with Steem which seems to be very similar from a user perspective (although the technology behind the scenes is very different) and already has a very big community surrounding it. It's possible of course that people will just start posting their content to both Steem and Akasha to make more money once it's past the beta stage and the tokens used are real.