LeoGlossary: 3Speak (Hive)
This is a video platform similar to YouTube that was created on the Hive blockchain. All videos appear on there as blog posts, with the text being immutable at the base layer. Since it utilizes Hive's account management system, individuals are in full control of their account.
In addition, 3Speak is a place where content creators directly own their onsite assets and their communities. Using blockchain technology, the ownership of these assets and communities are intrinsic to the creator and the user, not 3 Speak. They are therefore transferable to other applications that use blockchain technology. The result is that 3Speak is censorship resistant, cannot take your assets away or delete your communities.
Like most applications associated with this (Hive) blockchain, 3Speak uses the Proof-of-Brain consensus mechanism. This means that individuals are able to vote the videos, offering a reward to the content creators. This is paid out either in the form of Hive Power or HP along with HBD if the 50/50 payment option is selected.
Those who cast the votes are also able to earn curation rewards based upon the voting weight they utilize.
Free Speech
The 3Speak policy is that the ability to be offensive is the bedrock of Freedom of Speech, and in turn Freedom of Speech protects societies from descending into chaos and civil war. Everyone has the right to their opinions, no matter how offensive some other people may find it (as long as it's not inciting violence or illegal of course). The application welcomes those talking about cryptocurrency and other emerging technologies which are threats to the establishment. Many of these content creators are being silenced because rich and powerful organizations do not want to be challenged.
Citizen Journalism
Citizen Journalists are encouraged to join also. The goal is to post the kind of content which is often ignored or banned by other platforms. 3Speak believes that citizen journalists are the future, and invite them to come and use the Citizen Journalist Tag and Community.
Web 3.0
3Speak is at the epicenter of the formation of Web 3.0. Being tied to Hive provides a decentralized base layer which offer immutable text storage. Obviously, this application is a video platform, allowing users to create vlogs and other content of this nature. That is why IPFS integration is being worked upon.
A part of this process is developing a decentralized layer 2 node system that can operate similar to Hive. This means that people are incentivized to run infrastructure that is done in a way that has no single (or group) individual in control. This will extend immutability to the video, audio, NFT, and photo world.
Video
Video is now very important in the social media world. Most applications allow for the integration from other video platforms. This often includes YouTube and TikTok. Over the last couple years, the idea of shorts has become popular.
3Speak is approaching many of the applications on Hive in a similar manner. It is working on allow the uploading and posting of videos on the 3Speak platform from these different front ends.
Layout
The front end is rather intuitive. When the page is opened, people see a host of videos that are "trending". This is compiled used a proprietary system that combines votes, comments, and other factors.
There is also a "New Content" tab that users can click on to take them to the latest videos that are posted.
It also contains a "Leaderboard" which gamifies the system for long-term, frequent users.
Uploading a video is simple. One basically clicks the "Upload Video" button, which takes one to the Creator Studio. At that point, the video is uploaded, description added, tagged, along with an video image inserted.
Desktop Application
This is one of the novel features that is helping with the censorship resistance.
3Speak provides the ability to upload videos directly to IPFS without having to go through their video storage system. The desktop app can be downloaded directly to one's pc. This will allow for video uploading in a peer-to-peer fashion.
It is a feature that could turn into something powerful. If governments want to go after websites, it becomes impossible if the video content is not posted through a centralized server nor is it stored in such a manner.
Decentralized video storage one of the targets of the 3Speak platform.
The software is available free for download.
As of January 2023, the desktop application is being rewritten to enhance performance.
True Account Ownership
One of the key features of the Web 3.0 experience is for each user to have the ability to own his or her own account. A problem with YouTube is people sign in using their Google account. Guess who is in control of this? If you said Google, you would be correct.
3Speak is part of the Hive blockchain, utilizing the base layer account management system. This means there is true account ownership since the control of the accounts is not in the applications control. Anyone with a Hive account can sign into the platform.
This is a necessary component of censorship resistance. The concept is no good if an account can be closed and all the data erased. With Hive, whatever text that is on the blockchain, that is immutable. With 3Speak, video and audio will also bring that when the SpkNetwork is released.
Version 2.0
In early 2023, the development team announced the introduction of 3Speak v.2.0. This was a completely reworking of the back end to eliminate a major point of failure while also enhancing the decentralization of the operations.
The first version used the blockchain to post the metadata from a centralized database. This helped performance but was centralized, hence a vulnerability. It also made it difficult for others to spin of their own indexer.
Version 2.0 builds a dedicated indexer on top of Hive, allowing anyone to run the 3Speak back end. This obviously decentralizes the Additionally, this indexer will allow to add support for off-chain lite accounts using metamask, and eventually HIVE proxy accounts.
Technology involved:
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Off-chain indexer: This has been a long standing project to index offchain content without the need of a HIVE account.
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Union indexer: Handles indexing of on-chain and off-chain content, merging them into one unified interface
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Acela core: Handles authentication, scheduled posts, encoding, storage layer, curation and more.
SpkNetwork
3Speak is a front end that is presently tied to centralized servers. For the moment, videos are not hosted on decentralized storage devices. This is going to change with the SpkNetwork.
The idea behind this is to offer decentralized cloud services. This means that communities will be able to bring immutability to video, audio, and images just like Hive does to text.
Decentralized nodes will be incentivized via tokenization. Those who provide infrastructure are going to see rewards in tokens. This will likely be tied to decentralized finance (DeFi) features such as liquidity pools.
This is going to be the foundation for what is built on top. The technology will include smart contracts which opens things up to tokenized communities and other DeFi services. Decentralized exchanges (DEX) can be constructed to facilitate swapping of different digital assets.
3Speak is going to be built on top of this. Eventually, all videos uploaded through that front end will be housed on this infrastructure. Community members will provide the storage.
Being open source anyone will be able to utilize, duplicate, or fork the software. 3Speak is only one front end. It is probable that most decent sized communities create their own website or application in which to access the videos.
