ENS, Blogs, and IPFS Walk into a Bar
I was just reading this post from Andrey and thought it was a great way to analyze and compare where our social media apps can fail us. The criteria / questions are pretty simple:
- Can my identity be taken away?
- Can my audience be taken away?
- Can my ability to extend it and build on the protocol be taken away?
- What happens when the most popular app or instance becomes malicious?
- Is there something the maintainer can do that would prompt me to abandon the service/protocol altogether?
Of course after my new found mission to get everyone on blogs and RSS feeds, it made me wonder how it would qualify in such scenarios.
When it comes to identity being taken away, I suppose yes and no. A blog can exist on any platform. The only true identity is how you form it online and how you communicate it to people. On the flip side there is DNS, in which case you are purely renting it from a DNS provider. Even still it's a more resilient option compared to the majority of social media.
However, if you bring in a decentralized and blockchain enabled identity platform like ENS then it starts to solve a lot of the problems with traditional DNS. There is no almighty registrar that can take away your ENS; it's smart contracts that dictate your ability to have it. With the evolution of EVS V2 it will only get better as you will be able to add verifiable links or ownership of accounts across the web.
ENS also enables a way to link to your website. Not just any website though. Sure you can link to a classic domain where you site is hosted, but you can also set the contenthash of your ENS profile to point to a piece of content on IPFS. I'm a sucker for both protocols and have worked in them extensively, and it proves to be one of the most forward thinking ways to have autonomous websites. With the content hash someone could use a shortcut link like stevedylandev.eth.limo which routes the website through a gateway, or you could just grab the hash and visit it with your own IPFS node.
With this approach of ENS, IPFS, Blogs, and RSS feeds, you really can build quite a resilient social media setup. It's got all the best parts of the classic web with all the fixes that come from advances in blockchain and p2p file sharing.