Content on a Testnet

While working on the python tutorials, I did my best to continue the practice of maintaining the instructions for using a testnet, if present.

This is a neat trick because Hive doesn't have an official testnet. This is not a problem because it has an unofficial one, if you use tintoy.

Tintoy allows you to deploy a tiny local toy testnet containing 2,000 accounts.

Not all tutorials require a testnet. Some tutorials are bascially read-only. And for those, running against the mainnet is fine. But if you want to interact with the blockchain, those tutorials assume a testnet.

If you don't want to use a testnet, you can just point to the mainnet. But that's up to you.

The revised tutorials make use of tintoy so they can demonstrate otherwise dangerous or spammy operations, safely.

But I noticed something. When working on tutorials that demonstrated things like key management or transfers, it's great. Those operations work as expected. You can use tintoy to try out power ups, power downs, delegations. No problem.

The issue is anything dealing with content. When a tutorial demonstrates how to post a comment, vote, or reblog, tintoy can no longer show much in the way of content state.

This is because hived really has nothing to do with getting content anymore. That's hivemind's role. And tintoy doesn't have hivemind (yet).

So that creates difficulty. How do you verify the state of content without hivemind? Other than asking for the exact block your post was included in, there's no way to request any content from hived alone.

You're bascially blind. You can broadcast, but you can't easily check if the broadcast worked.

This implies that I need to add hivemind to tintoy. It also implies that I need to add jussi as well. Otherwise, you're having to deal with two distinct JSON-RPC ports. Adding jussi allows you to present both hived and hivemind as if they're running on the same port.

That would be the goal. Deploy a tintoy instance with hived, hivemind, and jussi, all rolled into one docker image and ready to go.

Basically, I have some work to do on tintoy.

Update: As of last night, tintoy now supports jussi and hivemind. You can try it out:

docker run -d -p 8090:8090 inertia/tintoy:latest