If you are a regular on this site, you already know that our rebrand from arweave.news to permaweb.news represents the basis for a much broader evolution towards a different news platform, with all of Arweaves's (and subsequently Web3's) innate characteristics: permanence, decentralisation, censorship resistance, etc. Still, permaweb.news alone covers a rather narrow range content-wise: the written word.
What you may not know (because here we're mainly covering the broader ecosystem and rarely speaking about our own endeavours) is that permaweb.news is just one of two products created by permawebDAO. The other one is Permacast. With these two products, we're aiming to cover the full spectre of web-served content: written (permaweb.news), audio and video (Permacast).
The way we publish content has changed as much in the past two decades as it did since between cuneiform and the introduction of the Gutenberg press.
It's easier to reach an audience on the other side of the planet than ever. But it's introduced enough issues to make users lament the simpler times: censorship, privacy concerns, and debt-collecting behaviour from centralised platforms that prioritise profits over user experience.
After the web2 social bubble burst, solutions that allow users to regain control over their data and express themselves without limitations are on trend. Built on-chain with no "rent" to pay, Permacast offers users personal control and freedom Web2 cannot.
Call it our response to the growing user dissatisfaction with centralised content platforms. Our weapon of choice: an open-source, customisable, and censorship-resistant environment.
Drawing inspiration from the decentralised and uncompromising nature of blockchain, while retaining the familiarity and simplicity of Web2 platforms such as Spotify and Twitter, Permacast aims to strike a balance to accommodate Web2 entrants and crypto natives alike.
For many Web2 podcast and video hosting users, Permacast may be significantly lighter on the budget:
While this is hard for me, because I generally tend to digress, I will try to keep this article concise, explaining the key features of Permacast, contrasting them with real-world examples for context, and showing the advantages they offer over traditional, centralised platforms that suffer from censorship and act as landlord-gatekeeper hybrids between your content and its audience. Let’s dive deep into what Permacast has to offer!
Built on the instantaneous and gasless Arweave Layer 2 solution called EXM (akin to Optimism), Permacast is what a decentralised Spotify / TikTok hybrid on steroids would look like.
Permacast enables free streaming of content for all users. In the industry of content hosting and serving, it is notorious for getting problematically expensive for the small players, but possible for Permacast because we're leveraging Arweave + Meson (and soon Livepeer transcoding).
Thanks to Arweave’s powerful gateways, not only do they let developers and businesses avoid the many pitfalls and scaling problems small players usually have to deal with, they also take on the costs of serving data (at least for the foreseeable future).
