My first web3 page... too!
Having read Dries Buytaert's post on creating his first web3 page, I set-of to experiment this myself. My curiosity was/remains ‘how ready is web3 for mass adoption by joe-public content creators, and with that gauge readiness for mass decentralisation of content’. Meaning authors would create, distribute and monetize their own content, and be less susceptible to censorship, media control as well as reduce if not eliminate intermediary fees.
Mass adoption of decentalised content would bleed if not kill existing platform providers, be it Youtube, Twitch.tv, medium or onlyfans! disruption is in the making!
So here' s what I did, I followed Dries's steps... and am sharing my experience of the how it went for a non-technical fella like me!
Step 1 Buy an ENS domain name
Ethereum Name Service (ENS) provides domain names that maps long crypto addresses to simple URLs, instead of copying long crypto addresses, users can simply send crypto to domains such as “kubair.eth.” Feel free to experiment 🙂
My web3 username is kubair.eth. If you’re curious there is more on ENS here, here and here.
This was a breeze, mind you I have a digital wallet (MetaMask), web3 browser (Brave) in place for moons. And yes you'll need some eth in your wallet for the purchase and other publishing transactions. My ENS domain cost around $46 in gas fees.
Step 2: Upload a HTML file to IPFS
You can create an HTML file using TextEdit, here's a guide and here's a video on how to do it.
Downloading, setting up and running my own local IPFS node was a breeze, however my laptop is not permanently connected to the internet, nor do I have mates with IPFS nodes permanently connected to the internet. Therefore I opted to use a third party pinning service so that my web3 page remains available even when my laptop is not connected to the internet. I am using Fleek for now.
Step 3: Visit your web3 webpage
After uploading a file to Fleek , I got the "IPFS hash" of the file. The hash of my index.html file is: bafybeia2bx7obtvddmakjrsjpjx2havauqze6izlbszmewjgzv72ifbblq
Using Brave, an IPFS-compatible browser, I accessed my webpage on:
ipfs://bafybeibbkhmln7o4ud6an4qk6bukcpri7nhiwv6pz6ygslgtsrey2c3o3q and boom it's on!
Other browsers you could checkout to surf Web3 are Opera, Status (mobile), MetaMask Mobile (mobile), and Puma.
Step 4: Map your webpage to your domain name
This too was simples and after 2-3 mins of propagation http://kubair.eth/ was live!
So....How Ready!
Web3 has some ways to go for mass adoption by joe-public content creators, and with that mass decentralisation of content too has some way to go as well. You can deep dive into limitations of what's possible using ENS and IPFS from Dries's post here.
Despite current imitations, there's no doubt that DAOs are the future, be it news networks, social networks or governance, the latter is my area of interest; distributed ledger tech/ Blockchain's potential to facilitate better governance of society and states. However that's a whitebaper in the oven.
Hope you enjoyed the read, this experiment challenged me a bit, taught me new things and was fun! I'd highly recommend giving it a go!
Some curious rabbit holes:
Lastly, If you got value from what I have shared please consider giving back by contributing towards Peace Through Prosperity, you can follow, broadcast or donate, and yes they do accept crypto; BTC, ETH and LTC!
