As 9ja Cosmos gears up for the Airdrop of Sino Amazons and their Sinosignias, we’ve been looking at image storage and display opportunities.
What we want:
A place where we can showcase project images with limited or no local platform engagement – we ‘drive’ the project message from other platforms (like Discord and LinkedIn), so a showcase platform with its own local engagement doctrine can confuse the message.
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Community Members, Investment Prospects and others need to be able to easily identify individual images from the showcase platform, and refer to them when discussing with us.
A ‘sandbox’ type environment in which the showcase project images, the message driver platform(s) and the funnel that connects them is shielded from exposure to third party content. This rules out using highly interactive platforms (like Instagram) as a showcase platform.
Low or Zero level (spammy) message intrusion (notifications) by the showcase platform
Modern account setup/security features (Modern, think things like ZKP, Legacy, think things like KYC and 2FA)
As 9ja Cosmos needs to keep with a Web3, Blockchain and NexGen Tech image, it’s preferable we extend our visibility with third parties which conjure up compatible impressions in the minds of enthusiasts, degens, collectors, investors and builders in our space. Pinterest began in 2010, and Instagram began as Burbn, a mobile check-in app, in the same year. 9ja Cosmos launched the first ever Web 3 Country Top Level Domain (TLD) in the world (.9jacom) in 2022, so our ‘break-out’ moment supersedes them by more than a decade.
Discovery:
With this in mind, we explored ‘Ente’ which the home page describes as a ‘Safe home for your photos – Store, share, and rediscover your memories with absolute privacy’ It was shared as a ‘suggestion’ on Discord by Handshake Director Paul Anthony Webb
‘Ente has apps for Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, Windows and the web’
There are 4 price points ranging from 50GB of storage from $3 US a month, to 2TB at $20 a month, and a 1 year free trial of 1GB
Loading:
The upload took me a few minutes. I uploaded a folders content from an old 1TB external SATA (mechanical) drive. There were 600 Sino Amazon images of 400-600kb each, and a speed test showed my upload speed at the time to be 5mbps , so that’s not too bad. The run of the project is about 1000 units, and that’s roughly only 0.5 Gb – half of the free 1 Gb allocation. Someone generating a lot of personal or work related content constantly on-the-fly, might eat that fairly quick. It’s fine for a finite project under 1 GB
Experience:
Display has both with Pros and Cons. I like that the Ente environment has a ‘dark mode’ option, which I will always enable if available (easier on my eyes). Pinterest doesn’t. Sino Amazon images have differing aspect ratios, and Pinterest always makes the ‘Portrait’ images (misleadingly) appear bigger to the visitor in thumbnail view, while Ente displays all in rows of the same length irrespective of width. Pinterest however, makes use of all available space in rows. Ente arranges files by creation date, and opens a new row for a different creation date, leaving any slots in an incomplete row unoccupied. Users of Midjourney will be familiar with this format.
Images can be identified more easily on Pinterest than Ente, just by clicking on an image opens up a record with extra info about it. However, this is seriously negated by the visitor needing to be logged into Pinterest, else, they will just get the thumbnail view. Once someone is given an Ente link by the album owner, they don’t need to be logged in to see the details on a browser.
Security and Privacy: Ente is way better than Pinterest. Anybody logged in with Pinterest can copy others ‘Pins’. Ente, however, can simply leave the ‘allow downloads’ option unchecked in the share settings, and this will prevent anybody saving your content.
At signup, Ente issues a ‘seed phrase’ that many with digital wallets will be familiar with. While folks can sign up with an email address, and I choose to use an official 9jacosmos mail account capable of being verified with my registrar – Namecheap, anybody can sign up using a ‘burner’ web based free email address. Ultimately, all that is needed is to keep the ‘seed phrase’ safe, allowing the account to be recovered on any device bearing any IP address, so it’s ZKP of sorts.
2FA is available but not compulsory.
Pinterest is way more spammy than Ente, which is a characteristic of many of the platforms of its era.
Excerpt ‘THE MYTH OF SINO AMAZONS’ – Origin, Appearance, Dress Code and Weapon Choices.
‘Nobody knows where Sino Amazons came from … There is no telling to what extent modern graphic representations of Sino Amazons are fact or fiction.
It was known that Sino Amazons were consummate polyglots. Apart from knowing several regional languages, individual Sino Amazons knew different combinations of, example, Arabic, Persian, Kurd, Turk, Sanskrit, and indigenous tribal Central and South American, African and Australasian languages.
From around 1500 forward, they also gained command of the European languages of Colonial Powers – Dutch, English, French, Portuguese and Spanish.
Sino Amazons didn’t have one uniform ethnic appearance. They bore features which seemed to be some fusion of regional origin with other origins further afield, often individually aligned with the range of languages they spoke.’
This defines the series as a whole, though individual appearances vary. We however constantly get spammed with suggestions that other ‘pins’ have been ‘inspired’ by us.
They are part of boards on themes that vary from ‘African Art’, ‘Vampirella’, ‘Fantasia’, ‘Wonderwomen’ and various other things, which while there may be some vague traits in common between individual ‘pins’ in these collections and a particular Sino Amazon, none of these collections even remotely meet the criteria of the Sino series in entirety.
In many cases, the content we are supposed to have ‘inspired’ has been created before our oldest Sino Amazon. We also get spammed with suggestions of content we might like to see, because apparently ‘we have a good eye’.
The spamming by Pinterest seems to be a ruse to suck ‘collection administrators’ into viewing other collections to drive up site engagement metrics.
So far, with Ente, we have only been emailed once – when we were sent the ‘verification code’ immediately following sign up! – Let’s hope it stays minimalist like this!
Conclusion:
For 9ja Cosmos purposes, both Ente and Pinterest have some trade offs in the display. Pinterest is slightly easier to use initially, but understanding how Ente works, isn’t a significant learning curve.
Ente storms ahead on Privacy and Security. Content curation scales infinitely better than Pinterest does. Pinterest constant spamming with viewing suggestions is pandemic. Ente is far more in tune with the ‘Product Generation’ 9ja Cosmos is part of.
There are just too many areas where Ente distinguishes itself consistent with the requirements of Sino Amazons, to consider Pinterest a serious contender.
9ja Cosmos is here…
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Preview our Sino Amazon/Sinosignia releases (Ente)
Preview our Sino Amazon/Sinosignia releases (Pinterest)