Ureka.Social: New - An On-Chain, Decentralised Bookmark System! No Server? No Problem!
Hey Everyone,
My almost daily updates for changes at Ureka.Social continue!
Today I have an exciting announcement - we have a new feature, which I do not think exists elsewhere on Hive. Decentralised bookmarking - using onchain, encrypted storage right from your browser.
EDIT: I just saw that Inleo lists decentralised bookmarking in their docs, but their API for it apprently isn't live.
If you sign in to Ureka, you will now see a new page in the menu for 'BOOKMARKS' and each post will have a small bookmark icon in the footer. If you click the bookmark, your Ureka client will write a small amount of data to the Hive blockchain to store the event. If you then unclick it, a 'delete' event will be recorded on chain too.
When you view your searchable bookmarks page, Ureka will build a database in your browser to hold all of your bookmarks, by searching the blockchain and fetching them for you. This all happens invisibly in the background but you have a handy 'Refresh' button on the page too in case you need to refresh the list on your device.
This means that your bookmarks will be accessible across all your devices, without Ureka needing to operate a server to manage the process or being able to see your bookmarks.
Note on encryption: Currently the bookmarks are encrypted before being written to the Hive blokchain, however, they are not encrypted once they are stored on your device - so be aware of that. If someone hacks your computer then they may be able to see your bookmarks in the browser storage.
So far this is working great for me in testing, please let me know your experiences!
Added: New onchain, decentralised bookmark system.
Fixed: Editing posts sometimes failed to return to the editor when keychain fails.
Improved: Minor UI improvements
Next up: Integration of Leo Threads. 😁
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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I'm making this my new daily driver for the time being to see if I end up missing anything about peakD or not. (probably not lol)
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Excellent! I haven't even been able to use Peakd here for a while due to constant API errors. The favourite system there hasn't worked for me for years. I told them but they never fixed it. I've designed Ureka to be more reliable - it's not 100% yet, but pretty solid I think. 🙂
I'd say so too so far, not had any issues yet, Felt very slow at first but that was due to being connected to a slower api node which is easily fixed. Overall I'm enjoying using ureka so far.
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Excellent, thanks for the feedback. The website client is serverless, meaning that once you download it from the ureka server, you don't connect to the server again - so it might be slightly heavier to download initially than other sites - but quicker after that. Yes, getting the right API node is important, so far I'm finding the server detection and selection logic works fine for me.
api.hive.blog can range anywhere from 100-500ms for me and seems to be the go to that's selected even though there are others close and faster.
I've also noticed that when I select a api node manually, if I refresh the page or return later it resets back to autoselect and thus back to api.hive.blog.
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I see, ok thanks for the feedback - I'll investigate.
Thanks for sharing Ureka’s on-chain bookmarks! It's great to see how this feature adds transparency and long-term access using blockchain. Looking forward to learning more about how users can interact with these bookmarks. Great work.
You are welcome. I just saw that Inleo lists onchain bookmarks as a feature that is meant to be available via API - but so far I haven't been able to make use of any of their APIs - so building my own solution works.
That's great 👍
Something I noticed, currently there I see no way to actually mute an account on ureka, Do you plan on adding this ability in the future?
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The muting is activated via the shield icon at the top of the posts:
You can view the list of muted accounts in the privacy tab in your settings area.
I haven't extensively tested muting, but it was working last time I checked.
Aah funny enough I just noticed the shield icon shortly after posting that comment, Likely missed it since everywhere else it's generally hidden behind the ... menus haha.
Shield icon makes so much more sense though and yes muting does work, just the lack of global blacklists and reputation based post hiding popped up some accounts that I hadn't muted.
Would I be correct in saying that not having global blacklists and rep based filtering of posts is a design choice?
I get the feeling that per user muting is all that's really needed. The user chooses what they want to see and it affects no one else. seems like the best way to go about it.
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Great questions. I actually completely forgot about blacklisting even existing on Hive until recently because I don't use it myself. I thought it might be good to give people the option to use blacklisting, but I agree that actually its probably more empowering and 'decentralised' to force users to take responsibility for their own connections. The biggest reason for me being on Hive and building Ureka is that I have seen first hand how terrible the censorship is online (most people never realise until they start going against the grain of the 'standardised society' publicly). So I strongly intend Ureka to not only overcome that but to also help evolve people's perspective on personal responsibility and free flow of information.
So, basically, I think I'll keep the blacklists disabled for now.
I'm not totally against the reputation based filtering, but I recall when I was being heavily downvoted that I was told 'there is no censorship on Hive, go build your own front end if you want real free speech' (basically words to that effect).. So I have and will experiment for now without the rep filtering. I may add it in depending on the outcomes.
oh the bookmark addition is a great tool, expecially on mobile it's very convenient!
I'm glad you like it! I am halfway through getting leo threads working - though I'm not sure if they will have a problem with the posts being shown in inleo too. I assumed that since PeakD supports leo threads that it would be fine, but I think inleo filters those out.
Let's see if you can get anything out of it, I will wait your updates ☺️
I am very well thank you for sharing about Ureka's and Bookmark. Have a good day.
Decentralized bookmarking sounds really innovative, especially with how it uses onchain, encrypted storage directly from the browser.
I will be adding more complicated onchain data structures in future to create new features that we have never seen before on Hive. Stay tuned :)
I love how Ureka is quietly becoming this powerful little platform. This bookmarking feature just made my Hive experience 10x better. Bookmarking posts is now finally stress-free.
That's great to hear! Yes, bringing new tools to Hive is so much fun! 😄
https://x.com/lee19389/status/1934549057734611443
#hive #posh
Whenever new and interesting things come up, people start to get more interested in the project and there is a lot to learn.