Decentralised Social Networks

Analytics/NLP engine for decentralised social networks.

Problem statement

Data on Decentralised social networks is sharded and distributed across multiple nodes. Unlike blockchains there is no single source of truth. Decentralised analytics aims to provide a robust, architecture that facilitates analytics for decentralised networks such as Nostr and Farcaster.

Supported Networks

• Nostr
• Farcaster

Tech Stack

• Python Engine
  • Data wrangling logic (Requesting prescribed events from relays)
  • Data pipelines/workflows implemented in Prefect
    • Producer (retrieving events from relays via websockets)
    • Consumer (persisting events to BigQuery)
• Prefect for Orchestration
• Apache Kafka for data streaming
• BigQuery for Data Warehousing
• DBT for data modelling
• Looker Studio for dashboards
  • Number of active relays distributed on a geographic map
  • Real-time dashboard of events of kinds 1,7 and 30023 kinds

Installation

1. Clone this repo!

2. Create free tier accounts for the following:

• BigQuery/GCP
• Upstash(Kafka)
• IP Geolocation

3. Generate GCP key that has admin rights to BigQuery and set default credentials

4. Install Terraform and [dbt](https://docs.getdbt.com/docs/core/pip-install

5. Configure the .env.prd with api keys, etc..

Terraform (Create BigQuery tables)

cd infrastructure/terraform/ && terraform apply

Run commands:

Nostr Events producer:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up produce_events

Nostr Events consumer:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up process_events

Nostr Relays producer:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up produce_relays

Nostr Relays consumer:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml up process_relays

Run DBT Transformation for dashboards after producers/consumers are running:

cd transformation/ && dbt run

Tests

pdm install

cd tests && pytest

Architecture

Future considerations

• Installation / deployment needs streamlining.
• Remove dependency on IP Geolocation service. Import data into BigQuery from free resources.
• Prefect Orchestration could be refactored without Click and retain similar functionality.
• More tests
• Better dashboards
• NLP analytics on content

Acknowledgements

Thanks to @jessthibault author of python-nostr where the Nostr base models were largely taken from and modified.