What would be the most practical way of using Autonomi to host images for forums and the like? The two ideas I have are using a dedicated client that would retrieve images for the forum users, placing a burden on that client, or each user would self-host a bridge and the image urls would point to a standard ip for that bridge, or something set by a cookie. Or if there is an extension that allows browsers to understand data maps, that could be used.
1 Like
Firstly there would be an app for users to view/add images as a stand alone App
Then forums simply store any uploaded images as a file and if desired call the imager APP to index the image in its “database”
Then any App can either call the imager App to scan the index of images or just link to an image directly. IE if a user wants to search GIFs/images then the forum calls the imager APP (of their choice) and if a user knows the image then can just insert the link.
There is no need for special clients or such thing. Its all in the APPs which can call the default client or bake in their own code to call the APIs
In Autonomi the burden is always on the user’s hardware since APPs only run on their device. There is no servers anywhere to do any work. The Apps running on the user’s device does all the work.
For 3rd party programs running on the internet then the server or user device calls these apps via some mechanism.
Yes there should be a browser that will be converted to use Autonomi very soon after the core system is in place and prob soon after launch. Since we are not sure exactly what is included in launch I am saying Apps appear after launch apart from the example ones we are using now
2 Likes
I’m thinking of a scenario where the forum is on the clearnet, just like the one we’re on now, and the only role Autonomi would serve is a place to store the images.
Like here, except instead of getting the image from another server, it would be from Autonomi. The browser is the app which displays the retrieved image data. I’m not sure what you mean by indexing the image.
2 Likes
I tried to cover that situation in the last part of my post.
Autonomi is not made for the current internet, but if the server has the Autonomi client side s/w installed then it would be possible for it to serve up content it retrieves off the network.
Or with a browser that has an addon or native coding then it will understand network links and get the data (images) via the client side s/w on the computer or native to browser
4 Likes
This may be of interest: Sn_httpd - Serving Autonomi data over HTTP
It’s a http bridge to retrieve files from autonomi.
You can run this as a local docker container, if you want the client to do all the lifting.
Note that it needs a version bump for the latest beta network (have the changes local, just not had chance to push).
9 Likes
I think now and with web sockets and wasm that making files on autonomi public to web sites should be much more feasible. It’s something we can and should do after the launch and quickly after launch.
16 Likes
just be sure to have the node-websocket-api return header data that includes Access-Control-Allow-Origin * or how it needs to be set correctly for browsers to not block it due to cross-site-scripting rules … but i guess you’ll stumble across it soon enough if you don’t anyway …
…and unencrypted websocket communication will get blocked from https sites (basically all current websites) so it better would be secure websocket (wss … never wrong to just use this instead of ws:// …) …
… there are probably enough stumbling stones left even when we have wasm … but nothing that couldn’t be overcome 
3 Likes
Oh crap… Self signed won’t do… And nobody will be willing to give an official certificate to random nodes…
… So I don’t think this will be possible without a browser extension
3 Likes
Nice 
work. We had a job to do there for sure, but I think we should be able to find something and filling that an extension at least.
7 Likes