Shift: Decentralized Explorer

Shift’s explorer uses sockets, meaning that messages are constantly being pushed to the client so the page displayed in the web browser doesn’t need to be refreshed. This cannot be done without a backend. The explorer also uses caching, so it therefore needs a file system. At the moment, the backend is excessively intertwined with the frontend. This makes it difficult to have the socket client at IPFS and the socket server at the explorer nodes, such that it is therefore impossible to host the explorer on the cluster. If the explorer’s code is rewritten, hosting it on the cluster should be possible. The explorer will be the first example of an “in real-time” dynamic website that is truly decentralized, even though IPFS’ pubsub is still in development and not yet completed as an alternative to traditional websockets.