Do you still remember that Steem is a blockchain?
Yesterday night (well, it was night here, GMT+8) Steemit went inaccessible for a long time – it’s not the first time, I mean, Steemit loves to give internal server errors from time to time. From a long time ago, but I wasn’t that active enough on this platform for me to be irritated by it. Well, talking about how inactive I was in the past…just imagine someone writing a post every two days, spend 0 time reading others’ stuff, 100% voting power for most of the times, etc. Yea that was me. Apparently this platform is a little bit more addictive than I expected.
In the past, I am pretty okay with it – yea, web servers have issues from time to time. I would see more errors when visiting random sites on the net or visiting government websites (ahem, they really have a lot of borked links everywhere). But as I learn more about the Steemit platform, something bothers me.
Steem is a blockchain. Steemit is accessible from a blockchain explorer. That means it also lies on the blockchain.
Source: Freepik
I never heard that a blockchain can go down. Many said that a blockchain can only be dead if the third thermonuclear war happens or there’s a global blackout…yea. Interesting.
After a little more researching, apparently there are a few types of nodes that make the Steem blockchain possible – witness nodes, full nodes, and seed nodes, etc. What we hear most of the time is the witness node, everyone tells you to vote for them because witnesses get paid for running a node (for details, check out this post) and they help to keep the Steem network running. What we are interacting with all the time is actually the full nodes – the nodes that can respond to your web browser when it pokes them.
We have about a dozen of full nodes around – and most of the times when one is not available, the others can still do their job and the network does not stop. That means there should not be a thing called “Steemit is down” or something like that since obviously you can just connect to another node and do the work there. That sounds pretty easy – because previously my own code did it. The funny part? I have not found a Steem UI that has this feature yet. That’s probably why everyone goes “Steemit is down” and does not know what can be done.
Steemit is getting more and more like a social media now, and you hardly see social media going down (except for Discord, if you count that as one). Probably they will have to abuse its full power as a blockchain or just make sure that Steemit’s public nodes never go down…yea, either.
Or, someone should really patch Steemit to make node switching a thing. It’s a blockchain :)
Until next time,
--Lilacse