Berty's dSocial Builder Journey

[jefft0]

This documents the continuing journey of Berty into Gno.land. This follows from our previous journey to create Gno Native Kit (formerly called GnoMobile).

The goal of dSocial is to create a test bed for building decentralized social media type of applications and experimenting with smart contract integrations around social media features. This test bed is not intended to be a polished end-user app but to experiment and stress test technical issues in using Gno.land related to implementing decentralized social apps.

The first version of dSocial will include the basic Twitter-like features like: post, react, notification, mentions, etc. dSocial will be built for mobile using the Gno Native Kit framework, but we will also include a minimal desktop app and a read-only web version.

Additional R&D issues we will investigate are:

• integrating a DAO moderation feature
• implementing a notification system using the “notifs core” code that is under development by the Gno core team
• studying the scalability of smart contracts and the potential solutions involving Merkel trees

You're invited to follow our Journey where we will document our experience using Gno, writing realm code, and track our issues and R&D results. 🚀

[jefft0]

Contributions to gnodev and gnofaucet

To work on GnoSocial, we have gotten started with the development cycle using gnodev and gnofaucet . We have opened the following PRs with contributions which are making our work smoother and hopefully for others too.

• When Iuri tried to use gnofaucet, it silently failed to start. This little PR adds the code to print the error messages (which was very helpful) chore: HTTP server error handling gno#1494 (Merged) Note: Even though this fixes the gnofaucet in the main repo, we are now using the new faucet at https://github.com/gnolang/faucet .
• We (previously) used gnofaucet with gnodev and restart gnodev, then gnofaucet stops working as explained in this PR that we opened to solve the problem. fix(gnofaucet): fix transactions by querying account number and sequence each time gno#1493 (Merged). Note: gnofaucet is deprecated but until it's removed this will fix the problem.
• gnodev starts a web server and the realm pages have nice help messages with the command to call the realm functions. This little PR updates gnodev to properly display the chain-id and remote address. Now we can copy/paste as intended. chore: In gnodev serveGnoWebServer, set webConfig HelpChainID and HelpRemote gno#1497 (Merged)
• The above PR depends on another little PR so that the web server properly displays the chain-id and remote address. fix: In gnoweb realm_help.html, update to Data.Config.HelpRemote and Data.Config.HelpChainID gno#1496 (Merged)

More to come for sure!

[jefft0]

More contributions to gnodev

In working with gnodev, we ran across an easy and a hard problem.

• The easy problem to solve was getting the correct current time from time.Now(), explained here gnodev time.Now() drifting away from real time gno#1507 and fixed in PR fix(gnodev): time drifting in gnodev gno#1510 (Merged)
• The hard problem is well-known but there was no issue for it yet so we made one gnodev time.Now() values are not preserved on reload gno#1509 . When transactions are "replayed", the result of time.Now() is the time of replay, not the time of the original transaction. This has the effect of erasing all timestamps. It happens in gnodev but also in other places where transactions are replayed such to migrate to a new testnet. You can see that all the timestamps are the same on the message board for testnet3. https://test3.gno.land/r/demo/boards:testboard . There are already plans to fix this in [portal loop] inject sdk.context when replaying transactions. gno#1511 .

[jefft0]

Contributions to r/demo/boards

GnoSocial is a modification of r/demo/boards . As we were developing we found some bugs which we fixed in GnoSocial, so we contributed some PRs to fix the same in r/demo/boards.

• The Render display of a message lets you click on the message creator's name to open the user details. The link was broken which we fixed in fix(r/demo/boards): update the user link in displayAddressMD to correct path gno#1525 (Merged)
• We implemented message reposting in GnoSocial in a similar way to r/demo/boards which was not showing the reposted messages in the Render page. We present one possible solution in fix(r/demo/boards): correctly render reposts gno#1530 (Merged)

[jefft0]

Contribution: Add Run to gnoclient

GnoSocial uses Gno Native Kit which is a thin wrapper on top of the gnoclient API. This already has Call to call a realm function. But for stress testing in GnoSocial we need to use ad-hoc scripts which run on the node and do multiple function calls. This was one of the purposes of the command-line gnokey maketx run. This pull request adds Run to gnoclient so we can do this programmatically. gnolang/gno#1574 (Merged)

[jefft0]

Stress testing app

Thanks to the Gno devs merging the PRs mentioned above, Gno Native Kit can now use the Run command to call realm functions repeatedly. We made a PR to use Run and gnodev to stress test storing thousands of messages. See the PR for preliminary results and near-term recommendations. Eventually, apps like this can be part of the automated testing of the Gno code. gnolang/gno#1583 (merged)

Some of the recommendations are done by this gnodev PR. gnolang/gno#1622 (Merged)

[jefft0]

Contribution: Improve error message in calling realm function

One of our devs lost time trying to understand an uninformative error message when calling a realm function with the wrong number of arguments. This will be a common problem for other devs. We made a small PR for the VM to check the number of arguments and give time-saving informative error messages. gnolang/gno#1610 (Merged)

[jefft0]

Contribution: Add Send to gnoclient

The gnoclient API already had support for MsgCall. Above, we mentioned how we added support for MsgRun. Here, we made a PR to add MsgSend to send coins from one account to another. We will be using this in the GnoSocial demo app. gnolang/gno#1639 (Merged)

[jefft0]

Stress testing with on-disk storage

With the help of @gfanton to show where to increase the maximum allowed gas in gnoland, it can be used for stress testing where hundreds of posts are added to the boards realm in each transaction. gnoland stores the data on disk, not in memory like gnodev currently does. So we wanted to stress test adding one million posts. Full details are in the stress test PR. In short, gnoland performed well. Transaction times remained constant and memory usage was reasonable.

[iuricmp]

Exploring the Onboarding Experience

We have explored some approaches to onboard users on the GnoSocial dApp. After some discussions, we've decided to keep using the Faucet Strategy. Even though we know that strategy is not suitable for the Mainet launch, we agreed to keep with it since we don't have any other alternative for now.
You can check out a quick demo about the Faucet Strategy here.

References:
Jae Kwon - gno demo at 25:20 How do you solve the onboarding with gas fees, or even like social media with gas fees?

[jefft0]

Contribution: p/demo/avlhelpers package and ListUsersByPrefix

In GnoSocial, we needed a utility to search the r/demo/users usernames by prefix. This is a useful tool for the avl.Tree, so after some discussion, we decided to make a new package p/demo/avlhelpers with a helper function ListKeysByPrefix. (In general, Gno devs are encouraged to write general packages.) Then the r/demo/users function ListUsersByPrefix simply calls it. gnolang/gno#1708 (Merged)