IPFS Boards

Boards is an experiment with the goal of figuring out whether it's possible to have a discussion board, forum or social network that works inside a normal browser tab without relying on servers, desktop applications, browser extensions, the blockchain or anything else.

The goals in detail:

• all communication should happen in the most distributed way possible using peer to peer systems
• should work completely offline without anything else other than a web browser after it's downloaded for the first time
• all data including assets, code and user created content needs to be distributed and/or replicated between the users

The project is in prototype stage and works thanks to the IPFS distributed file system.

The first iteration focuses on creating boards, posting content and commenting. Moderation tools, encryption, friends lists, private messages, real time chat and other features will be attempted in the future

Under the hood

This project is a web UI, orbit-db-discussion-board is the underlying library

Try it out

Years old build hosted on IPFS, probably broken by now:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYT9EzvQY8zwtxQxUhPcphSGR4XtTRkT4MnXmQKPFamQ7

This allows you to create boards and posts. There is no moderation or commenting yet and a lot of things are super wonky

Working on the code

This is a next.js project, a React framework.

Clone this repo, then run

• npm install to install dependencies
• npm run dev to start a development server
• npm run build to create a production build then npm start to start the frontend server

Old Version

You're looking at the new implementation of Boards. If you want to check out the old one follow this link