Textile’s network of cafes are now open to developers!
At Textile, we’ve been working hard to make building fast, high-quality IPFS apps easy for developers. One solution we’ve generated is Textile Cafes — trust-less, server-based Textile/IPFS peers that are capable of doing additional work for apps to make them run faster and smoother. The work done by Cafes ranges from simple IPFS pinning services, to providing gateways that do ‘on-the-fly’ decryption, to hosting secure message ‘inboxes’ for peers/users. All and all, we’ve found them super useful to build apps like Textile Photos and Notes quickly and easily.
Today, we are starting to open that network up to developers to help them quickly take their ideas to MVP or integrate new, decentralized features into their existing apps. As part of our ever-improving documentation, you can now find instructions on how to run your own cafes or register your application with one of Textile’s already running Cafes on the network.
There are so many amazing apps to be built on IPFS, come join the fun!
Learn more about Textile Cafes
Textile Cafes are part of the core infrastructure that keep all Textile-based apps humming along. They all run IPFS, so they speak the decentralized lingos fluently. They help app peers stay connected by providing IPFS routing services to any online peer. They also help peers reconnect by giving all your app’s users common peers to bootstrap when rejoining the network. Finally, they help deliver missed messages for when one of your users is offline but is sent a message.
On top of being the ‘good guy Greg’ of Textile peers, Cafes can provide a number of simple but powerful additional services for your app. Cafes have the ability to host complete, encrypted (i.e., in a zero-knowledge way) thread (the decentralized databases used in Textile) backups. This helps you ensure your user’s data is safe and recoverable at all times. Finally, they can perform work for your app, such as fetching raw data from a cafe’s decrypting gateway instead of running decryption on-device.
While cafes already do a lot for our network of applications, we think they can do a lot more still. Projects on the cafe road-map include Web2 bridges (e.g., feeds and webhooks), Filecoin support, and developer tools (e.g., analytics). Jump on our community slack channel to follow our progress, or reach out to us on Twitter if you have any questions!