Decentralized Microblogging website on Cardano
Social network are widely used, however many issues are linked with user privacy, data security, bot and abusive censorship that are mostly link with data centralization on massive player (Meta, Alphabet).
As data shouldn’t be centralized, an open and free common ledger is a key to avoid censorship. In that case data will be saved in case of massive deletion due to a hack. Moreover wallet can prevent email hacking/phishing. On this stack, user communities could build a user moderation based on their own website.
Introducing the project
This project introduce a decentralized Microblogging platform where data are directly saved on Cardano blockchain using self-transaction metadata.
Transaction purpose is to submit the post content directly on the blockchain. Self transaction reduce the cost of submit a transaction as the transaction is address to the user own wallet, that limit the fee at transaction fee.
Anyone with a Cardano wallet can join the network and submit a post. Wallet address are used as user handle that allow to directly reply to a post and start a conversation.
Censorship can be done at the website level but not at the blockchain level. Therefore several platform can use the same blockchain content with different moderation but the content will be always available by querying the blockchain. Moreover transaction fee will reduce the use of bot as it will be more expensive to perform an attack on the social network.
Demonstration
Website: opentrace.loclx.io
Youtube video: (coming)
Instruction
- Connect your wallet (wallet must be connected to the mainnet)
- Prepare the post
- Submit the post
- Reload the thread
Architecture and Stack
Wallet connector is provided by dynamic strategies and directly running on a React app. Multiple wallets are compatible with the connector (Nami, Eternl, Flint, NuFi).
Post are composed of a unique transaction, that contain the thread, the time and the message content and the author. Profile contain author username, picture and bio. The post picture is preferably saved on IPFS which is a decentralized storage. Post and profile information are firstly saved in a JSON structure then post directly on the blockchain using self transaction metadata on the label 94.
To increase the loading speed we add database from Restdb.io that will directly fetch information from the blockchain.
Limitation & Perspectives
Current system need to use transaction fees that can be expensive to pay with several use (0.18 ADA). Moreover current system is manual due to the hybrid blockchain-database system that reduce the user experience.
System can have extending function to interact with a post. For example voting functionalities that can allow user to take decisions.
