They claim to perform anonymous web hosting. Which means you can host dynamic content (apps) from their network.
They seem to imply they use sharding to store data, like Maidsafe.
Their one major flaw is that they seem to be willing to allow “community” censorship. If this is implemented, they will completely negate the entire point of having an anonymous hosting network in the first place, and it will destroy their product.
The reason I say “seem” is because they don’t talk as if they are 100% committed to anything in particular at this time.
Maidsafe’s commitment to 100% censorship resistance, is the only viable censorship resistance platform that I know of. The ability to act as a web server is a huge advantage for Substratum over Maid at the moment but it means nothing without censorship resistance.
If they allow the censorship door to open even a crack, it will be exploited to the fullest extent, rendering their entire project meaningless. Therefore, it doesn’t appear their team is truly committed to censorship resistance, unlike with Maid, where they make it a priority.
They have anonymity, but as you said, their idea about “community governance” completely destroys the concept of “censorship resistance.” Any powerful entity could simply model themselves as part of the “community” and vote down whatever content they wish to censor. China would do this in spades, for example.
Someone is not happy with Substratum (I’ve got that from the Riot chat today).
The article could also be an interesting read for the MaidSafe marketing team.
Ps: Maidsafe is mentioned as alternative somewhere in the Reddit comments…
Last time I checked substratum was stating to be revolutionary and super impressive and awesome but was just a vpn service planning on implementing some storage (and censorship) capabilities… So like a vpn service with built in tor bridge (but charging for surfing tor hidden services)
The blockchain was planned for voting on censorship stuff and for monetizing surfing their internal Web iirc
… But ofc this was more than half a year ago… Can have changed since then…
Ps: and I hope anybody corrects me if I mixed it up with another project now and was talking crap…