Social Media Architecture with IPFS

The best thing about IPNS is that it can use PubSub so you get Anchoring AND live update.

Super exciting! We separately converged to the same solution, which is a good sign.

@wclayf sir you need to catch up, my defluencer protocol already works like you described, else I will be the one to put Big Tech out of business! :stuck_out_tongue:

@reload Cool Stuff! Is it on Galacteek only for now? How can each node track all chains?

@SionoiS Hello!

Currently pronto is tied to galacteek but it wouldnā€™t be too much work to make it into a separate, standalone service (in python or other languages). The thing is, the whole linked-data machinery is a bit complex and iā€™d like to test it on a larger scale first.

Each node exposes their RDF graphs via an IPFS P2P SparQL service (P2P stream). Periodic pubsub messages trigger the sync process: new ontolochains are retrieved via SparQL, and then each chain is synced (pull new records, and for each record do the expansion and graph it).

Because of the combination of pubsub + P2P SparQL, each node knows everything at the same time (Hashgraph has similar properties).

Where can I find a link to the defluencer spec so I can start PubSubbing to it? The spec I wrote was just a mere suggestion:

All it really does is suggest we can just publish PublicKeys/CID pairs. My idea was to listen to all pubsub events on a channel and discard ones not sent by PKs I ā€œfollowā€ (or like). I considered one requirement to be ā€˜zero barrier to entryā€™ meaning that anyone can get started writing a client for in a couple of hours, just basically building on nothing more than one of the IPFS PubSub examples.

So yeah if thereā€™s already a working spec for how to do Social Media-like messaging over IPFS PubSub Iā€™m onboard. Unless itā€™s ugly or complex, Iā€™ll join you, and add your protocol to Quanta in a heartbeat.

Ah I misunderstood what you said @wclayf !
My protocol does not have ONE pubsub topic but many per person and you sub to the person you want.

Could one topic scale to planet size? IDK! Seams like a lot of filtering to do the more popular it gets.

Let me explain how my stuff work, you might like it. (or notā€¦) :man_shrugging:

A beacon object has all the data to sub and access a person content, pubsub topics, IPNS links, etcā€¦ This beacon doesnā€™t change and itā€™s CID can be used as a social media ID.

Then, you just have to resolve IPNS links and/or sub to those topics to get; Content Feed, Comments, Friends List, Moderation, etcā€¦

The magic happen when the app load your content, your friendā€™s content and maybe your friendā€™s friend content. It create a web of people.

Interesting. Do you know if anyone has tried getting Linked Data Fragments (LDF) working over IPFS? Seems like it should be fairly easy to do.

Iā€™ve also been thinking that IPNS urls are a much better publishing mechanism for RDF than http. It solves the stupid http-range-14 issue because the dereference is built in to the protocol and you donā€™t have to depend on controlling a domain name which was a bad decision to rely on everyone having access to a domain name. Purls where a bandaid. I would trust the persistence of a private cryptographic key way more than the ownership over a domain name.

I know a bit about LDF, i donā€™t know if someone does this on IPFS. LDFlex and comunica are really cool, Solid uses that.

Yes, a top priority was to control the schemas via IPNS, as i donā€™t trust DNS (who should ā€¦). The schemas live on your node, are easy to upgrade and manage ā€¦

So this guy (project link below) implemented what I was calling IPSMā€¦over the weekend!!! Two days! Heā€™s some kind of super genius and Iā€™m not even kidding.

You guys should check that project out. I spent all day looking it over, studying it, running it, and it works!! Itā€™s a Social Media network in pure IPFS and is as simple as the IPSM proposal/blog I wrote. And it ā€œjust works ā„¢ā€

@SionoiS Iā€™ll look over ā€˜beaconā€™ also, because that sounds pretty advanced/complex, but Iā€™m glad @undyingwraith showed that itā€™s possible to have a sort of ā€œLevel 1 Complianceā€ of IPSM (meaning purely simple IPFS PubSub-based messaging), using PublicKey only as identityā€¦

ā€¦and he just so happened to do this with my favorite tech stack: TypeScript+React. He nailed it.

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Hey guys!

I updated my website. https://bafybeifuu2njrul54bimwmxhvp6ozz3rwviubwpjutpyixu62allne3nwm.ipfs.dweb.link

I has a little explore button that links to your local IPFS explorer so that you can look at the IPLD schemas.

Otherwise itā€™s a pretty basic social media website.

Let me know what you think!

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The Berty Project has some similar goals and is using IPFS too:

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Berty is awesome!

Private messaging that also works offline over Bluetooth is next-gen tech.

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Latest galacteek snapshots.

The dvoz dapp is now a bit faster when it comes to making SparQL queries on the pronto RDF graphs, syncing between nodes should be less cpu-intensive now.

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Thanks for this great work, @SionoiS !

Some people might try to visit IPSM using the ipfs facility integrated into Brave Browser. Could you please include instructions for how to adjust the necessary settings in Braveā€™s ipfs or ipfs-companion? (If you could add some screenshots or even create a video gif, maybe using sharex or something similar, that would be great!)

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It was on purpose!

Brave having IPFS integrated is awesome BUT itā€™s very hard to configure it without fucking up (and if you do, IPFS in brave will no longer work at all yikes!).

Itā€™s sad but until they fix it somehow Iā€™m not going that route.

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@SionoiS - What about people who have only installed ipfs-desktop? How might they try?

@yeehi

See here

Use at your own risk itā€™s not really tested much.

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Thanks, I had a quick try testing it and couldnā€™t get it to install. Might this be packaged as an AppImage or .deb?

IDK maybe but your still asking a user to install IPFS.

The best would be browser integrated IPFS with a nice API. Iā€™m sure one dayā€¦

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Consider that many of the most popular Social Media platforms are mobile-first.

Nearly all of them are entirely catered to the phone app, while apps like Tiktok only really have a website for viewing, whereas Snapchat doesnā€™t allow you to access the platform AT ALL without the mobile app.

So I think having the user install IPFS is a non-issueā€”just bundle a node with your application, optimize it for mobile, and have a web2.0 website meant purely for non-users to discover the app or read public-facing content.

Linking this other post I just created:
https://discuss.ipfs.tech/t/decentralized-identity-and-web3-storage-via-ipns-and-mfs

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Iā€™m a fullstack typescript and Rust developer. Iā€™m really excited about this initial project, I thought it was just fantastic.