So I have some answers, and more questions, after publishing my first piece.
1 Can I have the things I publish here published on another app? Or could I create another app if I wanted to? Say if I did not like the direction mirror was taking?
No answer to this one yet. I may need to do some playing around
2 Where can I go and see my writing on the blockchain? Is it on the ethereum blockchain? Is it through arweave? It seems like some articles, like this one, I can see on the arweave blockchain. But others, like this one, don’t seem to have this. I wonder if I will find out after posting my first article
Yep, the answer is arweave. You can see my article published here. I don’t know the reason why I couldn’t see the arweave link on the articles I liked to in this questions, but it seems that when I refresh the page, the arweave link appears. Therefore my presumption is that everything gets sent to arweave!
Incidentally, it seems like arweave my not be as permanent as we might believe. There is good reason for this it seems, as there is much content that replicators would not feel comfortable about replicating, and this would help keep the standard of content high. However I wonder what this link means, and if already replicated content can be removed, and if so, under what guise:
It seems like this yellow paper will have some things to say about that…and on page 58, section 5.2, it seems to suggest that an individual storage node can remove a piece of data if it updates its content policy. It is not clear to me from reading the paper whether this means that other nodes will be prompted to drop the identified content. Something to investigate further
3 Does it cost me anything to publish? And if not, who is paying the gas fees for publishing my things to a blockchain?
No - there was no cost to me in publishing this piece.
There would have been a cost to publish it as an NFT. The gas was about $180USD from what I remember, and I decided not to proceed. However my piece still published without further warning, and it is showing as an NFT on my dashboard…so beware! Seems like a UI improvement that could be implemented at some point
4 Can I edit after publishing? My guess is that, if things are to be immutable and able to be sold as an NFT, then I should not be able to change what I write.
The answer is yes, and that this creates a new block on arweave. You can see my slightly edited piece here (and associated block entry on viewblock.io), and the original piece here (with its associated block entry on viewblock.io)
Kudos for spotting the edit without using a tool…
It seems like I cannot see the original piece of mirror.xzy, just the latest piece
That means I could probably sell an NFT for both pieces, however it is clear from the block entry that there was an original content digest that differs from the second/latest piece
New questions:
5 Who does pay to have the piece published and stored on arwave?
My presumption is that this is mirror.xzy doing this, using the funds it got from its initial round, or from the fees it takes from user transactions
6 How permanent is the date on arweave? And what does it mean for a node to change its policy and drop a piece of content? If others do not follow, must it accept the content?
Something for me to follow up later