3Speak Major Announcement | Refactor | v2.0
Hello, Hivers!
The current implementation of the site was built using a now legacy UI framework. This has constrained us on many aspects from performance, UI design, development time, and more nitty gritty details. An eventual refactor was inevitable. With an expanded dev team we are capable of tackling this major milestone in 3Speak development going forward.
The important bits:
- Modern UI framework
- Complete redesign of numerous pages on the 3Speak site
- Improved login experience
- Setting the stage for many new features
- Improved backend reliability & versatility.
- Improved support for 3rd party DApps
A New Backend
Previously, we used a centralized database to store post metadata with minimal active interaction with the blockchain. This gives us fast performance and advanced features like video recommendations, but with the downside of being centralized and a single point of failure. While the metadata is posted to chain, it's not easy for anyone to just spin up their own 3Speak indexer.
We are flipping this model upside down and building a dedicated indexer on top of HIVE to suit our needs and allow anyone to run a copy of the 3Speak backend. Initially, the indexer will only target support for 3Speak and @Dbuzz, but it can be extended to support other DApps. Additionally, this indexer will allow us to add support for offchain lite accounts using metamask, and eventually HIVE proxy accounts.
With growing needs from the mobile app, breakaway communities, and desktop app, this step will be an essential step towards long term growth. We are introducing a split architecture where the majority of reads/writes happen ontop of HIVE, while we maintain a separate system to provide the icing on the cake like scheduled posts, encoding, etc.
The indexer has already achieved incredible performance benchmarks. It's able to stream and process around 200 blocks per second from the HIVE chain using a combination of multi threaded streaming and bulk database operations. Meaning that frontends can finish indexing the HIVE chain in days instead of weeks (standard streaming with DHive)
We are also rebuilding the login flow:
- With support for Email/password HIVE keychain, HAS, and metamask.
- Starting with backend, we will create a new improved UI for login.
A small breakdown of the tech involved:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| Off chain indexer | This has been a long standing project to index offchain content without the need of a HIVE account. It has been utilized on DBuzz's beta project and a beta test site of our own |
| Union Indexer | Handles indexing of on chain and off chain content, merging them into one unified interface |
| Acela Core | Handles authentication, scheduled posts, encoding, storage layer, curation and more. This is the icing on the cake mentioned above |
Finally, we will be doing a phased rollout beta period. After testing we will rollout the updates to all users.
Increased communication
We will start doing more blog posts to keep the community informed on upcoming releases and events. Stay tuned!
Thank you all for the support. It has been an exciting journey, and we are determined to keep building to help the development of Hive, web3, and censorship resistance.