Deep Dive: Zoomerok

Empowering digital freedom by giving users full control over their data.

As Swarm’s ecosystem expands and projects approach their release dates, the following post will introduce one of the grantee projects that is bringing the world closer to making a fair data economy a reality.

What is Zoomerok?

Igor Shadurin, founder and developer of Zoomerok, shares part of his role in the growth of this ecosystem by elaborating on his experience of developing a fair data web service. Zoomerok provides users with a new “mobile-first approach” application that allows users to view and share videos and stay up to date with new content from creators by following their feed. The application will aim to have all the familiar video-playing features that exist on Web2 social media platforms coupled with the added benefits of Web3.

Taking Back Content Ownership

With Zoomerok, Igor puts autonomy, interoperability and data control back into the hands of users, replacing platforms previously lacking these characteristics. With more and more people migrating to blockchain alternatives, the established data monopoly will slowly break down to prioritise users and creators. When Igor realised that all the media content he had previously put online was not truly under his ownership but in fact the platform’s to control, it was safe to say that a blockchain solution would be the way to solve this digital sovereignty dilemma.

As social media platforms act as individual entities (for their own means), autonomy is preserved solely to the platform and not to the user. Igor imagines social platforms to be seamless, being interoperable between themselves. A creator should be able to present their data on whichever platform they desire, having complete autonomy over which platforms display what data with minimal effort. This safeguards a creator’s achievements, making them transferable across platforms. Giving the creator the control to bridge the gap between social platforms themselves reduces the possibilities of loss of content and impersonation.

Under the Hood

Maximising the Swarm ecosystem and other products created by fellow grantees, Igor utilises Fairdrive, a data storage interface, to allow for easy data transfer. User data is then easily extractable and transferable throughout the ecosystem — on the basis of consent, of course. Zoomerok utilises Swarm’s system for data storage, decentralisation and smart contracts for the user database, whilst Fairdrive acts as the vehicle between the user and their data. The Fair Data Society principles permeate throughout Zoomerok as it is open sourced and encourages a user-based improvement methodology.

The Overarching Goal to a Fair Data Economy

Zoomerok wants to enable content creators to thrive with full control over their data by building an easy, user-friendly application on top of Swarm, using Fairdrive as a backend. With seamless content retrieval in place, new decentralised storage systems will establish themselves as the natural successor to data monopolies, incentivising the growth of the Fair Data Society ecosystem and striving for our common goal — the fair data economy.

On top of single-handedly developing Zoomerok, Igor has also developed GetLoginEth and is part of the Swarm team currently developing Galileo — both recipients of the Swarm grant that is striving for a fair data economy. It is evident that the ecosystem is growing and it is strongly encouraged that fellow Fair Data Society principle thinkers join the endeavour of integrating the benefits of Web3 into the hands of Web2 users.

Disclaimer: The Deep Dive blog posts are an informative overview of some of the initiatives who build on Swarm and take ownership of the protocol. Projects subject to Deep Dives are independent and autonomous from the Swarm Foundation and Association. Sometimes they are their grantees, but their work is neither audited or endorsed by the aforementioned organisations. Use at your own risk, due your own due diligence.

Next Wave of SWARM Grants Coming Soon!

Fellow readers! There will be another round of grants coming up in the next few weeks and we cannot wait to see what projects apply.

What kind of projects are eligible to apply for a Swarm grant?

• Experimental and playful
• Interoperable with other applications
• Giving the user control over data
• Aligned with principles.fairdatasociety.org
• Free and open source

Be sure to follow us on Twitter and join our Discord to catch the latest announcements about Swarm grant updates and slot information.