Application: Social Networks on IPFS

[flyingzumwalt]

Work in progress - please contribute. See #40.

[creatinglake]

I am interested to see where this goes and am keen to understand how IPFS can enable decentralized social networks. How will identity be managed?

[flyingzumwalt]

@creatinglake this issue should become a good reference point for you. To be clear, we are gathering all the dominant use cases for "Things that people could do on IPFS" and gathering info about the many different companies, groups and projects who are using IPFS, libp2p, IPLD, etc. to build solutions in those spaces. Our priority is to make sure that the protocols, specs, and library implementations support those many projects.

For example, the Akasha team are putting a huge a amount of work into building a social network on IPFS. We want to make sure that our work supports theirs and others like them.

Specifically to your question about handling identity, We're not picking a preferred method. We think it's healthy for everyone to experiment in that space, to choose the option that fits their engineering constraints, and to publish their work so we can push the whole field forward.

[MichaelMure]

I'm working on that usecase here: https://github.com/MichaelMure/Arbore
Presentation website: http://arbo.re/

[singpolyma-shopify]

ipfs object diff is a great resource for being able to get something WebSub-alike (as well as initially a bridge to WebSub itself) going with minimal effort. Probably pubsub publish old hash + new hash (maybe ipns updates will work something like this eventually?) and then can easily diff to find what files have updates, etc.

[flyingzumwalt]

@singpolyma-shopify IPFS already has a pubsub implementation. These blog posts give an overview:

• https://ipfs.io/blog/25-pubsub/
• https://ipfs.io/blog/29-js-ipfs-pubsub/
• https://ipfs.io/blog/30-js-ipfs-crdts.md

and there's lots of discussion about using it in the ipfs forums

[singpolyma-shopify]

@flyingzumwalt I know, that's what I meant when I said "probably pubsub" :)

[flyingzumwalt]

ah. i see.

[ianopolous]

We are working a secure social network in Peergos
See also our book or our main site or our demo

[bertrandfalguiere]

A very interesting thread can be found here: https://discuss.ipfs.io/t/social-media-architecture-with-ipfs/4625 👍

[Clay-Ferguson]

I have a little platform of my own I'm developing "SubNode.org" which is not really ready to start accepting users, but is fairly powerful in certain ways. I do intend for it to be usable in a way where there's multiple 'instances' of it running to form a kind of distributed loosely coupled network. For identity management, and digital signatures, I was just going to allow users to upload a public key as their identity, and have a way of digitally signing content (encrypting it using their public key).

Whitepaper laying out my ideas in detail is on the way soon. I've been developing this for years long before IPFS even existed, and this is really like version 5.0 of it. Uses Java, TypeScript, MongoDB, springboot, ReactJS, and soon, an ability to post and read arbitrary nodes to/from IPFS.

Contact me! Help out! I'm looking for other contributors and would love to find funding and quit my day job to work on it full-time!

[jessicaschilling]

Note: Discussion on applications of IPFS are happening over in the IPFS Forums now ... please continue the discussion there!

This issue is being moved over to the archived repo https://github.com/ipfs/apps/ for reference.