CTO letter to the community

Dear community members,

We recently reached a great milestone on the SocialX journey: All photos, videos and other media can be stored decentrally on the SocialX app. When using the application, you won’t notice that your files are being stored decentrally. Yet, there is a lot of stuff going on behind the screen.

Here’s an overview of how your files get decentralised:

As with any social media platform, the first thing is to choose a file which you’d like to post on your SocialX profile page. In the case of SocialX, this would be an image or video.

When you upload an image or video, SocialX reads it as a raw file. A second media file (duplicate) is then created for the purpose of app performance optimization. The application uses IPFS to decentralise the two files (the original file and the optimized file).

All media information is sent to the main Infura IPFS node. All IPFS hashes of the media files are stored in the related post. The application also displays the IPFS media files with their publish hash viewer.

Why you should care where your data is stored?

Most people don’t really think about where data is stored and why it is so important. There are many great benefits to media decentralisation. First and foremost is data protection.

Decentralised files means that the community owns the files instead of a central authority. Central authorities can freely use people’s files and data (like Facebook). This is why decentralisation is so important. The solution is to take the power and control away from central authorities and to put it back in the hands of the community. The integration of decentralised media means we’ve made a big step toward taking social media to the next level!

At a later stage we will implement a governance and privacy system whereby you have control over your own data.

In the next edition I will explain our approach to P2P messaging in more detail.

Thank you for your time and if you have any questions, please write us in Telegram.

Cheers,

Jake