IPFS Versioner

Inspiration

In today's current events, there is a lot of uncertainty about the information that is spread over the internet and its truthfulness. Oftentimes when I read an article I will share a link with my peers, and frequently by the time they open the link, the contents of the article have changed. Seemingly static content on the internet is constantly changing, and can cause lots of confusion. There are plenty of examples of news website "changing facts" and companies changing their policies in a way that you can't see what was there before

What it does

IPFS Versioner sets out to solve this problem when using a desktop browser. It allows users to save versions of static webpages and compare the versions to each other (much like a git diff)

How we built it

IPFS Versioner is a chrome extension, and the majority of the code lives in the extension directory. The chrome apis allow for message passing between scripts. which then read/write from IPFS to see the changes, and persist metadata about the versions in an OrbitDB, which is built on top of IPFS.

Challenges we ran into

Learning how some of the chrome extension services worked with the IPFS client I was creating took a lot of trial and error, but overall a great learning experience.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that I am able to load the extension bundle into chrome locally and actually use the extension as I browse

What we learned

I've learned a lot about IPFS and the utilites that exist to work with it in projects

What's next for IPFS Versioner

IPFS Versioner has a lot of potential, the next big milestone would be getting the extenstion to work with metamask so that users can make sure important versions are persisted on the network and could provide filecoin through the extension

Built With

• chrome
• ipfs
• javascript
• node.js
• orbitdb