How to Access STEEM when Steemit is Down!

in steem •  7 years ago  (edited)

Hi everyone. Late night yesterday (and some of today morning as well), https://steemit.com was offline due to a purported DDOS attack on the website. However, because STEEM runs on a blockchain, the underlying database is always online; the challenge is simply to find ways to access it. How can we access STEEM's blockchain (for posting, commenting, curating, etc) while Steemit.com is down?

This post explores several alternatives including Busy.org, ChainBB, eSteem, SteemDB, and Steem Developer Beta (a secret little-known feature). Let's dive in.

Steem Developer Beta Website

A little known fact about Steemit is their developer beta website, located at https://steemitstage.com. It was created 2 months ago by the developer team (see this post), and is still running very well.

Steemit Stage is like a mirror to Steemit.com, and looks/runs pretty much exactly the same. There may be some underlying beta code/features, but one of the best parts is that during a DDOS attack, Steemit Stage is generally perfectly online. The catch is that very few people know about it (including the attacker himself/herself).

Korean Steem

For our Koreans, https://steemkr.com is another Steemit alternative with the same interface as Steemit, except most of the words are written in Korean. It still, however, provides a good look into the blockchain; additionally, you can access your normal STEEM accounts from SteemKR.

Busy.org Online Website

https://busy.org is an online website very similar to Steemit.com. However, it has its own developer team separate from Steemit Inc. (though they do collaborate sometimes), and a radically different UI/interface.

Rather than a top navigation bar like on Steemit, Busy.org uses a **left sidebar.** The sidebar includes tags, following accounts, your wallet, and settings. With Busy, you can do pretty much everything you can do on Steemit, from posting to voting to transferring funds.

Busy.org is a nice alternative to Steemit when the latter is down, and is also a nice standalone website to use by itself.

ChainBB Forum-Style Website

ChainBB also uses the STEEM blockchain, but categorizes posts like an online forum. Each post's main tag determines what "forum" or "thread" it's placed into, and this allows for a very different post structure/organization.

The interface of ChainBB, as you can see to the left, uses the top navigation bar for your account picture and rewards, and uses a left sidebar for navigating the forums. This different style provides contrast to what we've seen on other websites.

Something to know about ChainBB is, however, that they take a mandatory 15% cut on all of your author rewards for posts/articles, though this doesn't apply to comments.

eSteem Mobile App (iOS/Android)

eSteem is a mobile app for Android and iOS devices, developed by fellow Steemian @good-karma. It's a full-featured app with everything from posting/curating to fund transfers.

One of the cool parts about using eSteem are the loyalty rewards. If you use the eSteem app to post a comment or article with enough non-spam content, @good-karma and @esteemapp (and a few other accounts) will bestow you a few free small upvotes that, in total, can add up to about $0.30.


However, it should be noted that using eSteem gives @esteemapp a 5% cut on all of your author rewards.

The loyalty rewards generally add up to about $0.30, 25% of which is given to curators, so when you do the math, if your post is worth less than $4.50 you generally make a profit from using eSteem, and even if it's higher, it feels good to give back some profit to the developer @good-karma for future development :)

SteemDB Blockchain Explorer

Lastly, is SteemDB. It's not a full-featured website or client like the ones listed above, but does allow you to monitor your account for activity such as votes or comments, so you can get a quick overview at what's going on.

You can see that the layout is remarkably similar to that of ChainBB. This website is also very similar to SteemD, my other favorite blockchain explorer, except SteemD is sometimes down for maintenance.




All of these clients/websites/apps provide useful ways to interact with STEEM while https://steemit.com is down. Many of them are interesting/useful even when Steemit is up, so I highly recommend you check them out :)


Thanks for reading,
@mooncryption

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very useful post, and valuable information.
Thank you, sir

Isn't there something called Cli?

Yeah, CLI refers to "command line interface," meaning you run a Steem node on your command line. This is pretty advanced for most users, and you have to be really familiar with code to be able to do this, so it takes a while to understand.

yup..so write a 'shell' for it.
remember shells? before windows they were a 'thing'.

a new thing i have learn CLI " command line interface " Thanku so much Bro :)

Seriously Thats the reason why i love steemit :D we get to learn many many new things :)

Wow! I didn't know esteem takes a cut of author rewards??!!!
Luckily its really buggy and constantly crashes, so I haven't actually managed to make a post with it. Good to know, will definitely avoid that in future :)

Actually, many of the other non-Steemit apps take author rewards! Most of them use the rewards for further development of their apps. Here are the cuts:

  • eSteem app: 5%
  • chainBB app: 15%
  • Steemit.com: 0% (thankfully)

As a follower of @followforupvotes this post has been randomly selected and upvoted! Enjoy your upvote and have a great day!

Good info. Is Steem attacked and/or down/slow frequently? I just have 24h using Steem.

Not "frequently", though this may happen once or twice a year for about a day each.

This is only the 2nd time in 4 months that I've seen this kind of problem.

great article and well worth resteeming, my friend also now following and upvoted you

Thanks Mr. Ray for your kind comments :)

very useful post, and information.
Thank you, sir

Thanks!

Awesome and useful will definitely try this thanks mate. PS here's to hoping it never goes down again. Cheer$;)

I agree :) Steemit.com is my favorite website by far!

Timely info, for sure! Busy.org was a lifesaver for me today but it looks like steemitstage would have provided a more familiar posting function.

Thanks for sharing this!

Busy.org is useful in these times, but Steemit Stage is a sort of little-known secret for some of us :)

Thankfully, the DDOS attacker didn't know about Steemit Stage so it worked fine today.

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Too much useful post.

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@mooncryption great advice. Thanks for sharing. Upvoted. @gold84

Nice, thanks for this write up! Didn't know about steemitstage I'll try that next time I can't get in. The site was really unstable earlier today. I already knew about busy.org but couldn't log in there to due to an error.