Bankless: What are some decentralized content creation platforms worth paying attention to?

Author: William M. Peaster, Bankless; Translator: Tao Zhu, Golden Finance

I started writing in the crypto space in 2017. Since then, I've turned writing into a career and have witnessed the emergence of many great decentralized tools in our ecosystem that meet the needs of creators like me.

I've also seen many authors who came to the field after me and have also successfully emerged. It's always a pleasure to read excellent works from new faces. And I firmly believe that the crypto space needs more authors, such as analysts, commentators, educators, historians, poets, and so on.

Our field has always been hungry for fascinating views and in-depth discussions, and from my experience, I know that there are many people wandering on the edge of this field who have ideas worth publishing but just haven't found the way they want to advance.

What's the good news? If you can overcome the psychological barrier of showing yourself for the first time, there are many great tools available to you when you want to publish your content in a crypto-native way.

Of course, the obvious place to start is with decentralized publishing platforms. These platforms are great if you’re interested in publishing long-form content, like op-eds or long-form guides. Some of the main ones today include:

• Mirror — Last year, Paragraph acquired Mirror. I’d personally recommend Paragraph because of all the attention it’s getting right now, but Mirror is still solid for publishing on the top Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) network, and many top projects still publish there, like Optimism.

• Paragraph — Paragraph has been around for a while, and is more popular than ever thanks to its growing adoption in the Base and Farcaster ecosystems (e.g. the new Paragraph mini-app). It’s also very NFT-friendly. You can mint an entire article as an NFT, or just a snippet, or embed it in an external NFT-issuing project if you like.

• Fountain — Fountain is a new, open-source publishing platform built natively on the Lens network. If you find yourself investing more in the Lens ecosystem than elsewhere, Fountain is the logical choice for publishing long-form content, for now.

• Fileverse — Fileverse is built on a range of decentralized infrastructure like Ethereum, Gnosis Chain, Arweave, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS), Safe, and Ethereum Name Service (ENS), and its dDocs platform is like an on-chain version of Google Docs or Notion. It’s another interesting option if you’re looking for a place to archive and share your content. For example, I’ve archived some of my poetry here.
  

But what if you’re a text artist who tends to publish more short, graphic content, and you want to publish your text creations as true collectibles? You have some really good options here too, like:

• Highlight — This Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) platform just launched a brand new marketplace UX that allows you to list all kinds of non-fungible token (NFT) items. If you prefer to publish your actual text work as images and you have a batch of those that you want to publish all at once, this is arguably the best and most convenient platform for that right now.

• Rodeo — If you want to keep it casual and want an Instagram-like experience when posting text images, Rodeo is probably your best option right now. The app also just adopted USD denominated pricing, which makes it even more user-friendly.

• Zora — Zora is an on-chain creator platform where you can instantly turn any of your content into meme tokens. The project just launched support for text, so if you’re looking for a more liquid alternative to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) for your written work, you can now publish short text content as meme tokens here.
  

Of course, publishing your content is only half the battle. The other half is getting more people to see your content, which creates those desirable second-order effects, like sparking good community discussion, attracting more followers, and so on.

A way to get more results with less effort in this regard is to publish your on-chain content to on-chain social networks like Farcaster and Lens.

Speaking of Farcaster, the best Twitter-like app to get started with is Warpcast (which will likely be rebranded as Farcaster soon, sharing the platform’s name), as it has a large user base and also has a Paragraph mini-app that makes it easy for others to read and favorite your content.

Expect more creator-friendly mini-apps to come online in the coming months, or you can also consider creating or joining a creator channel like words.

Also, Farcaster is built on three chains (Ethereum, OP Mainnet, and Snapchain), while the latest version of Lens is deployed on its own network, the Lens chain. If you want to dive into publishing in the Lens ecosystem, you’ll have to get used to the environment here.

I’ve already mentioned Fountain, which is like the Lens version of Paragraph. But if you want a platform more similar to Warpcast or X (formerly Twitter) on this network, consider publishing on Hey. If you want to try something more innovative, consider Bonsai’s new Smart Media Studio, which allows you to publish AI-driven posts that evolve and generate revenue over time.

That being said, if you’re the kind of person who wants to publish work on X, Farcaster, and Lens at the same time, consider using a web3 cross-platform publishing application like Firefly or Yup.

Finally, there are a variety of other applications that you may find very useful. Like Hypersub, which is like a Patreon for blockchain, where you can manage subscriptions and send paid content to your most loyal fans.

Then, if you publish an article that starts to get traction, consider posting it to Kiwi News, which is like a crypto-friendly Hacker News section with all kinds of interesting blockchain-related topics.

I know what it’s like to be nervous about publishing your own work. I also know what imposter syndrome feels like, and I still feel it sometimes to this day. But if you want to be a creator in crypto, at some point you have to cross that threshold and be brave enough to participate.

Your biggest obstacle right now is likely psychological. You will get better over time, we all do. But I think it’s fair to say that in crypto, we need more people to step up and become creators. I hope you can write. Don’t be afraid to start. If you decide to take this step, try these tools and make them work for you.