VP Guilds

VP Guilds is a decentralized social media/community platform currently hosted on Fleek built with NEAR protocol and Textile Hub (ThreadsDB). As a guild leader in NEAR’s guild program looking to grow and engage a guild of developers, I wanted to ensure we were practicing what we preach by using a decentralized platform as the basis for the community – couldn’t find any good ones in existence.

At a high level – VP Guilds does what you’d expect most community platforms to do. It manages account authentication, profiles, and content CRUD operations. Because it’s built using blockchain tech it also has tokens inherently built in which provides potential for many crypto gamification and utility features, and of course all the identity and data sovereignty associated with blockchain tech.

How it works:

1. It uses NEAR accounts as Textile identities for Textile. Potential or existing community members authenticate with human readable names managed by NEAR wallet providing some advantages for social media type applications over typical blockchain accounts including recovery options for when Bob ultimately loses his keys.

2. It gets associated with a libp2p identity that is used by the application to query a backend authentication server to receive a Textile token to create user and app level threads using Textile ThreadsDB.

3. While identities, threads and keys are stored in browser local storage - to ensure ongoing access to user and app data in event that browser storage is cleared, the NEAR account, libp2p identity and textile threadIds are encrypted and stored on the NEAR chain.

4. Inside the Dapp, the NEAR contracts provide the functionality that makes it useful as a community platform, linking and storing unique ids on chain that are associated to content, comments, profiles and so on in Textile Hub collections and records setup to store the actual data on IPFS.

5. Finally, it’s been deployed to Fleek – which I must say was an absolute, uncomplicated pleasure to do.