In ancient Greece, there existed a city called "Polis" where people gathered to discuss a wide range of topics, such as politics, governance, and laws.
Unfortunately, they didn't delve into the art of building a database in IPFS.
That's precisely why, as a group of developers who created a dApp bearing the same name, "Polis," we had to navigate through all the challenges, endure a few curses, and occasionally bang our heads on the keyboard.
In this developers tale , I will attempt to explain in detail our developer journey, focusing most importantly on the thought process, surprises, and gotchas behind the solution. Please note that this is not a step-by-step guide covering the entire development process from booting up your laptop. Of course, this may not be the best solution available, but it can serve as a valuable resource for someone trying to build something similar or explore further experimentation.
what is Polis ?
It was a cool name proposed by @GuiBibeau. As an added benefit, if someone I meet asks me what I'm currently doing, I can simply mention that I'm involved in police work, which is actually easier than explaining how blockchain works!
But Polis's primary function is to gather any dApp and present it to the world. While there are additional plans on the roadmap, for now, anyone can submit their app to Polis. Take a look for yourself here and feel free to submit if you have something to share. Also here is a link to the repo if you want to follow along.
We had a requirement from the beginning that using dApp should be free for all our users. Further we wanted to make a decentralise database to have reduced reliance on centralised providers.
So we were in a quest to look for an hero!
First one to leave our list of considerations was the blockchain. Mostly because of the gas fees. since the amount of data that we are planing to collect is high too with data points such as descriptions, links and even images, it will be expensive to write to blockchain.