SocialX Database System

Introduction

During the last months we build a scalable and decentralised social media network as we promised earlier this year. Now it’s time to release it bit by bit to ensure that everyone will have SocialX on his radar over the next months. With over 662 commits we will soon be able to present you the latest stage of the app. The private circle will be the first to get a glance at the App followed by everyone who signed up for the beta.

But of course in order to publish the beta we needed to design a stable infrastructure. Figure 1 displays the infrastructure we have chosen for running SocialX.

Figure 1

As you can see we are using database peers as one important part of our infrastructure. This blogpost aims to explain how you can setup a database peer to support the decentralised approach of SocialX.

What is the purpose of Database peers?

Database peers save the data from SocialX and distribute it to the users. In the database peers we save e.g. user data, post data and comments.

Media e.g. photos and videos will not be saved in the database peers as we are using the IPFS for storing these larger files.

Everyone is invited to run a database peer. This way we can increase the grade of decentralisation for SocialX. Database peer also sync peer-to-peer to other peers.

Figure 2

Towards that every phone which runs the SocialX App also acts as a database peer which saves the data on the phone. This can be activated or deactivated individually by the users.
( Figure 2)

Peers and Super-Peers

We will use peers and super peers in our architecture in order to have a enough computational power and storage, allowing SocialX to run as efficiently and safe as possible.

Figure 3

How can you support the new era of the decentralisation of social networks?

Nothing easier than that !

First we would like to ask you to fill out this form:

Now how can you create a peer and be a database peer for SocialX ?

1. Create a VPS Server with Docker e.g. https://www.digitalocean.com/products/one-click-apps/docker/
2. https://hub.docker.com/r/socialxnetwork/socialx-node/

sudo ufw allow 8765
docker pull socialxnetwork/socialx-node
docker run -d -p 8765:8765 socialxnetwork/socialx-node

3. Check if your node is running with docker ps
4. That´s it!

We also created a Video Step-by-Step guide

1. How to add a droplet to the docker
2. How to start the SocialX node with the terminal and the docker droplet
3. How to create a project for the digitalocean VPS
4. How to check the latest docker version
5. How to check if SocialX node is running

Stay tuned for our November recap and if you have any questions, please send us a message or write us in Telegram.