Earlier we talked about the Web3 social network Solcial. As you remember, one of the advantages of Solcial is that there is no censorship. 

But do you know what makes Solcial actually uncensored? Let's talk about that.

Solcial doesn’t rely on censorable servers or gateways. All user’s content on Solcial is stored on IPFS and accessed through a P2P layer.

So what is IPFS?

IPFS means InterPlanetary File System. Is a peer-to-peer hypermedia communication protocol. Peer-to-peer means based on equality of participants, i.e. in this case there is no central server, which is the main in relation to other participants.

In practice, the use of IPFS means that nodes (our devices) store and distribute data among themselves, forming a single distributed file system.

When you add a file to IPFS, your file is split into smaller chunks, cryptographically hashed, and given a unique fingerprint called a content identifier (CID).

When some nodes search for a particular file, they essentially ask other peer nodes who stores the content to which the CID refers. In order to quickly find out which node stores what, each node in the network stores some indexing information. Once the nearest node storing the desired file is found, it becomes possible to establish direct (P2P) access to it, i.e., directly view or download the file.

When other nodes view or download your file, they cache a copy — and become another provider of your content until their cache is cleared. But they can also pin content and remain your content provider all the time. For example, the Solcial team plans to use special nodes that will store users’ content. This will increase the bandwidth for accessing our files, and continue streaming content when the content owner’s device goes offline.

At the same time any node storing a copy of the file can refuse to store it at any time. This option will also be used by Solcial nodes if someone’s content receives a certain number of reports. I.e. such content will be detached from Solcial nodes and will remain only on the creator’s device or on the devices of those people who want to continue broadcasting it.

I hope now you have a better understanding of how content will be stored and shared on Solсial, and why Solсial will be really uncensored!

Useful links: Solcial wiki | Solcial blog | Solcial Telegram | Solcial Discord