Framework for importing content and migrating profiles to the Safe Network

Apps
1

Would it make sense to start a project or at least outline a framework for a set of tools that would help importing various kind of data and migrating social profiles from the clear net to the Safe Network? It would help populating the network with useful content and would lower the friction that comes with leaving one’s established social profiles behind.

I’m thinking importers / migration helpers would be useful for at least:

  • MediaWiki sites, especially Wikipedia, in multiple languages
  • Facebook, obviously – who wouldn’t want to migrate to the Safe Network from that site…
  • microblogs: Twitter, Mastodon, etc
  • picture sites: Instagram, Pinterest, DeviantArt, etc
  • major blog engines and sites: Medium, WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, etc
  • forums: Discourse, etc
  • video sites: youtube-dl already covers most
  • torrent files: automatically store the files on Safe (and create a map for the torrent hash) instead of just downloading them locally
  • etc

(!) The point is not only importing the content, but automatically linking the Safe version to the clear net version so that already imported content is automatically accessed through the Safe Network instead.

While these tools could be run standalone, to crawl entire sites, they could also be integrated with the browser, so when someone opened a supported site, they would be redirected to the Safe version (kinda like the HTTPS Everywhere extension) if it’s already imported, but if not, the content would be loaded from the internet and the extension would automatically import the content to the Safe Network or it would show an “unsafe” badge and allow to initiate the import, based on the user’s preferences.

12 Likes
2

I think this is an important thing to get going. We can also collaborate with others such as the Solid community who have similar goals (especially if we can agree on suitable target translations to Linked Data, see also the Data Transfer Project).

5 Likes
3

I wasn’t aware of the DTP, it seems to cover much of the profile migration side of things.

What I’m also thinking about, and it’s not covered by the DTP, is importing random content into Safe opportunistically. For example, if I’m watching videos on YouTube, all of them (together with their metadata) would get imported into Safe automatically (let’s say I set my preferences as such).

The network would get populated with content much faster than if we depended only on case-by-case import decisions or fresh content, and the browser extension would ensure that content that existed on Safe would be loaded from Safe, which would make farming profitable much earlier than otherwise.

By the time most people realized there is a Safe Network, it would already be ready to serve.

9 Likes
4

Tim just created this repo so it looks like the Solid folks are getting going on this. We could work together I would think, make a SAFE fork perhaps and contribute PRs.

10 Likes