Intent to Witness
This is my post about my intent to witness and what I can contribute to the Steemit community as a witness. First, I would like to start with describing my witness server as well as what I am already doing for the steemit community. Finally, I will wrap up by explaining my designs on the future of steemit and my role in it as a witness.
What I Contribute as a Witness
My Server
Here are the specifications for the hardware I am running on. I run a multinode Kubernetes cluster. The plan is to expand as my user base grows. My witness node is a full node.
| Node 1 | |
|---|---|
| CPU | 2 x 2.6 Ghz 8-core Xeon |
| RAM | 10 GB |
| Disk | 10 GB SSD |
| Node 2 | |
|---|---|
| CPU | 2 x 2.6 Ghz 8-core Xeon |
| RAM | 10 GB |
| Disk | 10 GB SSD |
| Node 3 | |
|---|---|
| CPU | 2 x 2.6 Ghz 8-core Xeon |
| RAM | 10 GB |
| Disk | 10 GB SSD |
| Witness Node | |
|---|---|
| CPU | 4 x 2.6 Ghz 8-core Xeon |
| RAM | 1 TB |
| Disk | 4 TB SSD |
Network connectivity
I am currently on a 100Gbps+ capacity network; however, I am working to gain access to the internet2 backbone which will offer over 10Tbps network capacity and guaranteed 100Gbps.
For Minnows
Recently, I was asked
What do you stand for and support?
to which I replied, "I'm for high quality software built on the blockchain. Bots are superficial. It's time to go for building real software."
... which yielded ...
How does this help minnows?
It means:
- More opportunities for investment
- Right now minnows have few options
- Create content
- Buy votes from bots
- Right now minnows have few options
- Alternatives to trending feed and voting bots for getting your content visible
- Alternatives for content creators to create content
- Right now, you just have a blog
- The blog is saturated with unrelated content competing for the same rewards in one huge melting pot
- I want alternatives for users.
- User interfaces that are meaningful to the kind of content you want to create
- Not just a reskin of the condenser
- Tools for users to publish and promote their content
- Interfaces that allow good content near the surface instead of well-financed content.
- User interfaces that are meaningful to the kind of content you want to create
- Right now, you just have a blog
There are different types of users on steemit and they clash daily as different cultures fight to find equality on an economic scale within the platform. That is as artists find that to excel within the steemit economoy, they find they need to become savvy crypto currency investors in order for their content to surpass or even compete with that of savvy crypto currency investors. It's a culture clash that leads to the saturation of lesser content.
I understand the frustrations of minnows and my proposed solution is to take steemit to the level users deserve.
A Voice Against Abuse
I stand against bullies, trolls, and reward pool abusers. There are bad actors among us that aren't interested in investing in the community of steemit. I am part of several communites and am a founding member of We-Resist(@the-resistance)
Discord https://discord.gg/USYwcMh
Our community and bot focuses on supporting minnows that unfairly suffer downvote loss from grumpycat. This is not a campaign against grumpycat nor are we defenders of spam content. Rather, we protect minnows with good content that are unjustly attacked. We believe that users are the future of steem. It is wrong to support bad content and drive away users creating good content.
Software Development
I am a regular contributor to Utopian and have several projects to help users within the steemit community. I would like to develop more meaningful software for the community.
Exifr
This is a bot that provides EXIF data for photographers on their posts. See Introducing Exifr
we-resist-bot
This is an ethical voting bot. It votes to help users that are victims of downvote abuse. See we-resist-bot
Telegram Reply Bot
Allows users to conduct correspondence on posts through telegram. See Telegram Reply Bot
Steem bot Examples
Some examples I have developed of bots for steem
To Infinity ...
My end-goal is to start a community of developers that are focused on the highest quality (enterprise-level) software. There are development communities out there, but these communities are inward focused rather than outward focused (looking at you Utopian).
I want to make high quality, SLA-worthy, apps and give other developers without the resources to do the same thing. I want to make it so regular bloggers on steemit with a decent amount of experience can build high quality applications and deliver enterprise-level uptimes and service without having to fork over tons of cash to VPS providers.
I know there are really good developers on this platform, but they're stuck with cut-rate service because they can't afford to get into AWS, digital ocean, or rackspace to deliver high end SLA to users. The best they can get is privex VPS and even then they have to manage most of the maintenance.
Here are Some Applications I Want to Build for the Platform
Support me, and we can make this real. I have outlined the projects at my request for help.
Yay! Congratulations!
You have already helped out this community in amazing ways! Looking forward to seeing the value you continue to bring through this new endeavor. Count me in :)
I will vote for you! You are a person that interacts and does a lot for the community here.
Thanks so much for your vote! I'll keep at it so you can thrive here
I'm not a tech guru, but my interactions with you show me you're a smart, patient person, with your heart in the right place. So I have no hesitation cast a vote for you. I have confidence you'll do your best to take the platform in the right direction. Thank you.
@madpuppy You can never silence the voices of the righteous.
You earned my respect a long time ago (well, some weeks :)). Now I can give back. Just gave you one of my witness votes.
Thanks for all the great work you are doing for the community. Have fun.
BTW: What costs do you have running the servers?
Ditto.
Whelp. I'll have to get back with you because my bills haven't come in yet. I'm paying
$150 USD / monthfor my internet, but I don't really pay it because it's subsidized by work. My electricity is not though and I haven't seen the bill. I have a power regulator that says it's doing about 3 kWh which is about right because there's 4 x 1200 W PSU's. I'll have to do the math on what that is costing me.I got my servers at a University auction. It department was auctioning old proliant servers. Some already had 1 TB of ram that they were using for their openstack farm. I know because I used work there. It cost me around $6k for what normally costs $20k.
Just curious about this, could you explain if you're running Steem on the cluster? Steem performance is not CPU bound. It doesn't need a ton of cores unless you absolutely need to compile in less than 1 minute :P
Your witness server's specs are pretty impressive, and it might actually be better put to use as an API node. If you use it for your witness node, at least you'll know you won't need to upgrade for a while!
Cool. K8s let's me downscale pretty easily, so I may just do that. That way I can divert them to other nodes. I could probably start a couple more nodes. Thanks.
Also, it is running as a
full node. Every plugin is enabled.1 TB RAM!
Yeah, along with 100GBps+ Net connectivity, Man are you operating all this from south pole,,, wishing you best of luck, Hit the miles brother. We are with you #r351574nc3
You will do great things!
You have earned the respect of many, including me.
Don't forget to have fun on the way.
FD.
You will never walk alone!
@the-resistance
I learn much about steem js in your github repo :)
https://github.com/r351574nc3/steem-bot-examples?files=1
Done, you are my witness now!
Thanks brother.