How Unstoppable Domains uses 3Box to power dBlogs
3Box partner series highlights innovative partners and their use cases for 3Box.
Unstoppable Domains announced dBlogs on Thursday, giving users a way to publish censorship-resistant blogs. By using 3Box to publish and store each blog’s content, dBlogs is able to promise bloggers that their content is fully in their control and not captive to any platform’s terms or censorship.
Some of the top thought leaders in crypto are already being published via 3Box and dblogs. For example check out MeltemDemirors.crypto, Timdraperblog.crypto, and WMougayar.crypto.
The Challenge
Unstoppable Domains lets users register and manage blockchain domain names. Like GoDaddy in the traditional web, they aimed to make it easy for domain owners to create websites. dBlogs provide an easy template for anyone to quickly create, customize and publish a blog on their domain.
They knew that the content of blogs must be censorship-resistant, controlled by domain owners, and not subject to the whims or moderation of platform owners — including Unstoppable Domains itself. Content could be hosted on IPFS, but to make it a complete blogging tool they needed a more robust system including:
- A way for users to customize their blogging site
- A way for users to easily manage their posts, including editing drafts
- A way for users to engage on each others’ blog posts with comments, likes and shares to make them more social and complete
Doing this in-house would have required building a user identity model to associate content to, storing mappings between users and blog content, encrypting user settings and preferences, and adding a separate commenting system. Then, all this would need to be tied together.
The Solution
3Box provided all of the user management and data storage needed by dBlogs in one solution
By using 3Box to publish and store content, dBlogs can be built on a single system that seamlessly lets users manage the content, settings and social actions.
After registering a domain, users can create a website and select the “Blog” template. They are then prompted to create or link their 3Box account.
After connecting their 3Box account to their website and domain, users can customize the settings of their blogging template by adjusting the design, logo, blog name, social links displayed. This data is saved in to a users’ 3Box space for the website.
After this, users publish their blog through the Unstoppable Domains management dashboard. An IPFS hash where content will be linked to their .crypto domain name, so after the transaction completes the blog will now be hosted on the purchased domain. For example, you can find my blog at dannyzuckerman.crypto.
Users can then navigate to their blog and sign in to add, edit and manage their blog posts directly. The blog post editor is simple but with all the basics needed. Each blog post and its related metadata is stored as a thread in the user’s 3Box, giving them complete control of the content over time. Posts can also be deleted later, removing them from the blog. Because content is stored with the user, it could also be published simultaneously to other sites without needing to go through the unstoppable domains blog or service.
Once published, other users can interact with blog posts, also powered by 3Box. Currently there is a ‘bookmark’ feature, and anytime a user bookmarks another post that bookmark is stored to a 3Box space. Similarly, users can give 👍 to posts at the bottom of a post, which are also saved to each users’ 3Box space.
dBlogs will be adding comments soon using the 3Box comments plugin, making every blog post more engaging and social. When live, each comment will be saved in a 3Box thread shared by each user, and the original poster will have moderation control of the comment threads attached to their blogs — no centralized control, censorship or moderation from Unstoppable Domains or any other host. This is the promise that can be made with user-managed content, letting Unstoppable Domains offer truly trusted, unstoppable dBlogs in a simple, infrastructure-less way to their users.
Visit 3Box and Unstoppable Domains for more
Head over to Unstoppable Domains to buy your .crypto domain and launch your dblog today. Big thanks to Donald Stolz for the great work putting these products together.
If you’re looking to build a product or tool with simple user-managed data and identity that works seamlessly with existing crypto keys, check out docs.3Box.io or come by our discord community. #BuildBetter
