Finding content by type

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1

Hi,

If I’d have an (Electron) app that produces a certain kind of artefacts, let’s say planet photo galleries, and adds them by using Helia: How can a peer find all available photo galleries produced by that app (by other peers) ?

A peer can choose to like some of those images, and pins them to IPFS by doing so. Maybe the same question: How can peers find available photos that have been liked?

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You could implement one or more custom protocols that lets users of your app:

  1. Exchange lists of photo gallery CIDs or IPNS names (better, since they can update them without having to contact your peer again)
  2. Exchange activity logs (e.g. who liked what)
  3. Discover other peers that support your app’s protocol(s)

A peer needs a way to bootstrap into this network, so you might stand up some servers that speak your protocol and configure your app to connect to them on startup using the @libp2p/bootstrap module, then they can start to discover other peers using your protocol’s peer exchange (point 3 above).

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Thanks @achingbrain for the tips.

Are there any introductory documents on implementing your own protocol?

Could a distributed database, like OrbitDB, help in such a scenario?

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There’s a self-directed tutorial on how to write custom protocols available here - @libp2p/protocol-adventure

OrbitDB would probably help for sharing data like the contents of each gallery, for sure.

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