We have now gotten a store that you can publish notes and comments with.
But you cannot actually control who and what gets to comment and count as a valid comment.
In other words: How can you moderate a Peer-to-Peer Database?
Well, you can't really. Or at least, you cannot moderate data on another persons computer.
I cannot delete a file on your computer, anymore than you can delete a file on mine.
If either of us could do that, we would consider that malware.
And this is not a Tutorial on writing malware, so we'll not go into it.
Moderating is generally considered to be two separate tasks:
- Restricting the writing to a database
- Restricting the reading from a database and sharing of contents.
In a decentralized network, sharing data is easy. Once any peer has some data, they can share it essentially until their bandwidth runs out.
But writing control is more complex. We cannot prevent somebody from writing to their own local database, but we can decide, whether we will accept the local changes from another peer in our own database.
And there OrbitDB AccessControllers
come into action.
They are invoked when an OrbitDB instance receives new entries for a specific database and they determine, whether the OrbitDB Instance should accept and use these entries or deny and trash them.
Remember: These rules, that you write into the AccessController can be changed or ignored by other peers, if they so wish. But then again, consider whether it's important to you what other peers do with their own database, as long as your database is clean and conforming to all the rules you laid out?
Additionally, if most peers follow your rules, then most content that violates these rules will not persist anyway, because nobody is around to pin it. Although in some cases for some specific data, somebody might be really insistent and pin it anyway.