How BBS Brings a Web2 Experience to Web3 Discourse! – #PoweredByEOS

Social bulletin board sites like Reddit are a fantastic way to connect with others and build community online. However, secret algorithms and opaque codebases rob users of the trust they need to ensure corporations and governments do not curate their content.

BBS solves this by recording all data on-chain and distributing BBS tokens to early adopters who build and moderate thriving message boards on the network. BBS aims to demonopolize social networking, and EOS is a cost-effective way to store all the data required to operate this platform in a decentralized way.

• BBS decentralizes content sharing by allowing anyone to make a bulletin board hosted on the BBS Directory that publishes content to the EOS blockchain.

If you’re short on time, jump to the bottom for a quick summary of the article.

BBS Decentralized Bulletin Board Network

Before Reddit and Myspace, thousands of individuals ran bulletin board services (BBS) from their home computers. In the heyday of the wild-west internet, before large centralized companies took on the responsibility of curating user-generated content, cyberpunks and niche communities gathered in these message boards. They sang the praises of the internet’s openness and envisioned a future of unprecedented individual power, propelled by the innovation of connecting all the world’s people.

Little did these visionaries know that corporations would usurp the technology being used to pursue freedom. As social media exploded in the marketplace, distributed systems like the old BBS servers disappeared in favour of economies of scale and huge social media conglomerates. These new entities store data and use convoluted algorithms to serve users only what is marketable or advertiser-friendly. Instead of opening up the world of information sharing, the internet became a curated social space where information stewards tightly control the information people can access.

The BBS Network changes this dynamic by bringing back the idea of user-generated bulletin boards. BBS servers of the 80s and 90s inspired both the project’s name and function. The BBS Network replicates these servers using the EOS blockchain and allows individuals to boot up blockchain bulletin servers using a standardized protocol agnostic to content.

BBS Network is similar to widely popular message boards like Reddit. However, BBS is a public online service. It utilizes a distributed architecture, distributed revenue model, and distributed infrastructure, rather than unilateral control of the product, service and revenue.

The EOS network plays a crucial role in helping BBS solve the scaling problems that come from operating a social content network on the blockchain. EOS is a cost-effective way to store all the BBS network’s data on-chain, which is pivotal to maintaining the platform’s decentralization.

Speed, Cost, and Liquidity Make EOS a Clear Choice

The EOS network was a natural choice for the BBS Network. CEO Eyal Hertzog helped build Bancor and has been involved in the EOS ecosystem for years. The BBS team knows EOS well and has worked with the technology since before it was released. By leveraging EOS’s most compelling value propositions, the BBS network can scale its services to its user base.

The power of the BBS protocol lies in empowering people to create bulletin boards. Users create boards by publishing a boilerplate smart contract on the blockchain, which can interact with the BBS network.

Publishing a smart contract would be costly in other blockchain ecosystems, sometimes costing thousands of dollars. On EOS, the BBS platform can easily afford the hundredths of a cent cost for contract deployment, allowing abstraction on the front end and decentralization on the back end without resorting to a second-layer blockchain. This dramatic cost gap mitigates the user acquisition costs of blockchain onboarding while still providing the benefits of a distributed ledger. Bringing these costs down to parity with incumbents is essential to competing effectively with Web 2.0 platforms.

Waiting for transaction confirmation is another key impediment to user retention in the Web3 world. Among other considerations, a network’s block time determines its transaction confirmation time. Ethereum has a block time of 15 seconds, forcing users to wait minutes for confirmations or to trust a layer-two solution for the bulk of transactions. In contrast, the EOS network appends blocks every half-second.

The EOS network’s transaction speed presents a nearly indistinguishable user experience from traditional databases. This parity reduces user churn due to UX speed and offers an open and resilient alternative to traditional software architecture.

EOS also benefits from broad adoption and high liquidity across exchanges. The BBS network distributes BBS tokens to community participants to incentivize the ecosystem. Users can transfer, buy, and sell these tokens, which they can use to advertise on the platform. However, with few tokens available on exchanges, the ability to buy or sell a token is limited. Any large buy or sell orders will have outsized effects on price, making payouts unpredictable. 

BBS solves this using a liquidity pool with EOS that allows users to instantly swap between BBS and EOS without a counterparty buyer or seller. EOS is widely adopted across exchanges globally, with deep liquidity and more than 90% of tokens owned by the public. When paired with low transaction fees, EOS’s adoption allows users to easily onboard or cash out their BBS tokens almost directly for cash, with minimal transaction fees and without significant price slippage. 

These benefits, among others, allow the BBS Network to scale its operations without the blockchain causing a bottleneck. With its extensive liquidity across exchanges, nearly instant transaction speed, and minimal fees, EOS provides unparalleled value to the BBS Network’s decentralized operations.

Create Your Own Bulletin Board With the BBS Network

If you’re a content creator, you can use BBS to create and run your internet community, connecting to the larger BBS Network with 35k active users per month. Depending on the level of engagement, posts on these boards generate engagement mining revenue, which the protocol shares between BBS Owners, Board Moderators, Content Publishers, Hosting Operators, and Developers. 

You can see stats and leaderboards at https://bbs.market/METABBS/rewards. Some of the most popular boards include TV talk, cricket talk, Ukraine news, Star Wars theory, Covid Roundtable, and many more.

To get in on the action, create an account and a new BBS board. You can create a BBS board about your company, Youtube channel, favourite TV show, or any other community. What kind of message board could you create? BBS invites you to find out!

BBS Empowers Communities to Self-Organize and Share

The BBS Network is a powerful tool that allows anyone to create and curate decentralized message boards for their communities. Large, corporate-controlled platforms are fragile, presenting a single source of failure and an avenue for information distortion. Decentralization of these services is essential to resilience. We’re thrilled to see BBS take advantage of EOS’s many features and benefits. 

To recap:

• BBS is a decentralized bulletin board service that, like Reddit, allows users to create and participate in bulletin boards.
• As a social media platform, BBS takes full advantage of EOS transaction speed to serve users an experience indistinguishable from traditional software stacks.
• EOS allows BBS to deploy bulletin board smart contracts for their users at a radically lower cost than other decentralized smart contract platforms, abstracting away the blockchain for users. 
• The broad exchange adoption and high liquidity of EOS allow users to easily swap their BBS tokens for EOS and cash out in their preferred currency.

Since time immemorial, those in power have leveraged their power to restrict people from discussing inconvenient information. The internet has amplified the potential reach of ideas, but at the same time, it has bolstered the control and surveillance of those already powerful. Only by creating systems that actively fight this dynamic by using open protocols can the powerless stand some chance of challenging the status quo. The BBS Network is one of these open protocols, and it harnesses another by utilizing the EOS Network.

We hope you enjoyed learning all about how this project leverages EOS to achieve a seamless blockchain experience at near-zero cost. 

The BBS Network is just one of many innovative initiatives leveraging the Antelope protocol and EOS blockchain to push the boundaries of Web3. Learn more about this and everything else EOS at EOSNetwork.com.

About the BBS Network

The mission of the BBS Network is to ensure freedom of expression, collaboration and liberty through open database technology; to establish a public network of online message boards as an attractive and reliable alternative to the solutions offered by today’s Internet giants; and to place the power back in the hands of the content creators and their community of followers, allowing them to earn for their contribution automatically within the ecosystem.

About The EOS Network

The EOS Network is a 3rd generation blockchain platform powered by the EOS VM, a low-latency, highly performant, and extensible WebAssembly engine for deterministic execution of near feeless transactions; purpose-built for enabling optimal web3 user and developer experiences. EOS is the Antelope protocol’s flagship blockchain and financial center, serving as the driving force behind multi-chain collaboration and public goods funding for tools and infrastructure through the EOS Network Foundation (ENF).

About The EOS Network Foundation

The EOS Network Foundation (ENF) is a not-for-profit organization that coordinates financial and non-financial support to encourage the growth and development of the EOS Network. The ENF is the hub of the EOS Network, harnessing the power of decentralization as a force for positive global change to chart a coordinated future for EOS.

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