Steemit.com Temporarily Down

I am travelling all day so I wanted to post my #challenge30days post before I left. Steemit.com, however, is being unresponsive. If Steem was a centralized, corporate owned service like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, etc., I would now be at their mercy to access my own data. I could lose the challenge if they were down for much longer.

Luckily (and quite revolutionarily), all of our data (posts, comments, interaction history) is stored on the Steem blockchain. The Steem blockchain is upkept by the servers of the Steem witnesses (link is to Busy.org because Steemit.com is temporarily down). Steemit is just one of many front-end website that are built on top of the Steem blockchain, showing you Steem posts in a Reddit-like interface. But there's also Steepshot for showing you your posts with an Instagram UI, DTube with a YouTube UI, and even DSound with a Soundcloud UI.

The difference is that once you post once on any of these platforms, your data is written to the Steem blockchain and thus it is safe and still there if any of these front-end websites go down. Times like this are when it becomes most useful because, even though Steemit.com is down, I can still log into my account, write posts, browse my feed, interact with others. There is no disruption to my day or worry that my data is gone. I am writing this post right now from Busy.org and am still on track for my #challenge30days.

Steemit can be taken away, but our data never can.

Update: Steemit.com is back up and running. Fortunately the down time was not too long. It was still a nice experience using Busy.org for a big and I'll probably continue playing around with it.

This post is part of the January 30 Days Writing Challenge, started by @dragosroua. I have an addition of my own to the challenge: If on any day of January I don't post, I will forfeit both the SP in STEEM and SBD of my most recent post to anyone who commented on that post.