Inter Planetary Blog

Inspiration

Governments censor most of the things that are posted and bring it down easily. Freedom of speech is restricted in many parts of the world. This is a problem as people don't know whats the truth about a particular thing. Another issue is when a person posts something, his identity is also at risk.

What it does

Inter Planetary Blog lets you post content (images, link, videos, text) on the Inter Planetary File System. It has a nice editor built in, that lets you format content the way you want. Also, you can see other articles and opinions.

How we built it

Inter Planetary Blog is built on top of cutting edge technology, that wants to make web decentralised. Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) is a peer to peer hyper media protocol that lets you access content via distributed nature. Every computer system acts as an IPFS node and content can be accessed from each other. In other words it is server less. And data added to IPFS is immutable, which is suitable for out kind of application. We used IPFS-JS API to connect to IPFS network and Firebase to maintain a database of IPFS hashes.

We have used Inter Planetary File System(IPFS) to achieve the same. We have used IPFS javascript API to connect to the IPFS network and then add that content to the same. We have built a website which uploads the blog to the internet and then it cannot be taken down unless collected by IPFS Garbage Collector.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted our IPFS hash database to decentralised as well. This will make it a pure decentralised app. We used orbit-db, decentralised database also built on top of IPFS. But unfortunately, it is still alpha stage, so integration with out app was not possible due to unstable APIs and scare resources.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Inter Planetary Blog itself is completely decentralised and is hosted on IPFS. It is running server less. Also Inter Planetary File System is a new cutting edge technology which hasn't been implemented much yet. With the scarcity of tutorials we have been able to make a project with such a technology. And to show that such technology has very significant implications in our society.

What we learned

We learnt about IPFS APIs and we learnt about orbit-db, even though we weren't able to implement it. This shows IPFS is ready to be implemented in projects.

What's next for Inter Planetary Blog

Our next step from here, would be to remove our dependency from Firebase DB and to move to completely decentralised database. Right now it is accessed through IPFS gateway, but we also have plans to provide a human friendly domain to reach IPBlog.

Built With

• firebase
• html5
• ipfs
• javascript
• microsoft-vision