A new website, ZeroMedium, has launched on the largely incensurable peer-to-peer network, ZeroNet. As the name suggests, it largely tries to emulate the blogging platform Medium. The launch could be important for ZeroNet users who live in repressive countries that may want to censor political blog posts, for example. With ZeroMedium being run atop ZeroNet, it would be next to impossible to censor content uploaded there, or control who views it.
ZeroMedium has been developed by a user going by the name Krixano, a 19-year-old student at Briar Cliff University. He began work on ZeroMedium at the start of September and had implemented enough of the planned features that they decided to launch their site. In a post on ZeroMedium, Krixano wrote:
“What is ZeroMedium? ZeroMedium, as previously stated, is a clone of Medium. The goal of this project was to make something that has the same feel of Medium for the ZeroNet. Eventually, I will want to have all the features of Medium on ZeroMedium because I think it is a very good social, constructive, and informational platform.”
In it’s current state, many sites on ZeroNet are blogs because they’re easy to create, you just clone another blog and get given an empty template to start working from. For this reason it’s quite important for ZeroNet when completely new sites like ZeroMedium crop up because they greatly increase the use of the platform.
Right now, it’s unclear which direction the website will head in; on a technical level it has potential to grow into something similar to Medium. On the other hand, due to the nature of ZeroNet, there will be no way for admins to start censoring or removing posts which might lead to spam articles being created; nevertheless still an interesting project to watch.
ZeroNet is available on Windows, Mac and Linux with an Android app currently branded as "Early Access" on the Google Play Store. You can find out how to setup ZeroNet on the project"s website. Once ZeroNet is running on your device, ZeroMedium will be available (the link will not work without ZeroNet).