Optimizing Community Description

Yeah, it will work, but it’s not a general solution for stateful storage, some message may not send every 24 hours, and multiple versions needs to be handled in client side. The stateful store is mean to handle this conflict and reduce version to save more bandwidth.

To update specific fields is too much complexity. A KV store is a much easier solution for decentralized network in my gut feeling. Also if specific fields matters, it should be split into another KV record.

I feel the changes to implement this diff mechanism is also big and needs Waku protocol level support, a generalized Sync protocol is probably needed for this to happen. cc @SionoiS

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agreed, but i think this protocol will need a little more thought and research to handle other use-cases as well. it doesn’t seem to cover a lot of scope just for this single use-case where every-time all data is over-ridden.
i have been thinking about a similar state-mgmt protocol as well, and i think this protocol needs to support working with state diffs as well as @fryorcraken suggested.

which is why as a stop-gap wondering if we can quickly migrate these messages to separate shard and use existing store protocol itself to query required data at client. At max the overhead on clients would be to handle maybe few more messages which should not be a huge bandwidth overhead considering these won’t be via relay anymore.

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I was describing the state of the app requirements as they are now. If we need to make that compromise and build the members list dynamically due to technical reasons, I am totally fine with that. We just need to be careful not to break users’ expectations.

There are cases where users are inactive on given channels and yet might be targets of mentions on different ones. For example, one can participate in only a few channels of the community, but we might want to tag them in another where an important discussion is ongoing. This scenario can be mitigated with various techniques, such as displaying every active user of a community in the mention list and performing channel membership validation on-chain just before sending (if the member is not in the dynamically built member list, of course).

In the context of this discussion, I assumed that the edit functions refer to membership manipulation. I then assumed that many parties, such as the owner and token masters, would be performing members reevaluation to determine if members satisfy modified permissions. This would lead to redundant on-chain checks. This is an issue because reevaluation itself is very greedy and was identified as one of the reasons why the infura limit was exhausted in the past.

I probably misunderstood, and @jonathanr meant edit functions in general. That’s fine; we just need to figure out members reevaluation. For simplicity’s sake, it could still be performed by the owner, who would trigger it once they recognize that the permissions have been modified in the CommunityDescription on-chain.

No problem, happy to help!

Might be dumb question but why not to push CommunityDescription to store nodes directly then, i.e. don’t use relay for this type of message at all?

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I think the strategy makes sense in general, but I want to emphasize that CommunityDescription is attached to various message types, and the periodic community publishing done by the owner might not be the biggest concern here in terms of bandwidth.

CommunityDescription is part of:

  • CommunityRequestToJoinResponse, which is propagated through relay once if the owner accepts the request on their own, or twice if acceptance comes from a privileged member.
  • CommunityEventsMessage, which is propagated through relay each time privileged members make changes to the community.
  • SyncInstallationCommunity, which is propagated through relay each time a backup is created or a sync is performed. Backup occurs every 8 hours or on demand. Sync is performed when there are paired devices and the user either requests to join the community, joins the community, leaves the community, or opens the community on mobile (fix(communities)!: stop syncing community on `LastOpenedAt` update by osmaczko · Pull Request #5884 · status-im/status-go · GitHub).

We will need to rework all of these to not contain CommunityDescription.

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There are multiple stores and the only way to share/save messages is via relay currently. The store sync protocol (not fully implemented) may be applied here actually, so that we don’t depend on the relay.

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It seams to me like some of the problems here boils down to IAM, PKI and decentralized identity.

This spec here solves those problems quite well. GitHub - cryptidtech/provenance-specifications: Specifications for the various new pieces of provenance tech

This video helps understand. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxU4wG4ryFo

If we don’t want to impl. stuff ourselves there’s this company. https://www.cryptid.tech/

Their tech is already built on IPFS.

I think I did have in mind not just edits, but also members management. However, you’re right that those require chain look ups, so it’s not a good idea to have all admins do that. Especially considering normal Admins (not TokenMasters) don’t even have the shared addresses.

In theory, if we do use a smart contract, the users’ addresses would become “public” anyway, so we can have the admins receive the addresses as well.

However, like you said, the full re-evaluation should still be done only by the control node or need a mechanism where only one does it, because it is very request consuming.

So yeah, it’s not simple, but might be doable.

Yes, this is one of the short term strategies we should be using. Using light push to push a message to store node, and not propagating it through relay.

I agree with you. I wanted to through the diff in the mix but a first solution may not need that. In any case, as @SionoiS stated:

A store latest only scenario will need for the sender to prove that the new copy is from the same origin.
Meaning that there needs to be some identity. It would be a very narrow application:

  1. Message X is received and store
  2. Message Y is received and signals here to override X
    Some zk id needs to be in place to prove that Y and X are from the same sender.

Yes, noted. Indeed, if CommunityDescription is the first problem to solve, then solution cannot seem to be routing/storage only. We may need to refer to a messages instead of including it and do the necessary adjustement on the application protocol level.

@kaichao I suggest next step is to set a roadmap, ie, steps, to understand what matters most before proposing further solutions.
To analyse that, I suggest moving forward with splitting message type per shards, which will enable us to better understand the volume per type, as well as getting some more fine tune control on message retention.

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Sounds like something hopefully solved by e2e reliability (with the causal dependencies etc.)