Application developers and service providers are creating easy-to-use end-user tools for file storage and sharing based on the Filecoin protocol. One of the most exciting projects born in this wave of innovation is Slate (http://slate.host/), an open source storage system built on Filecoin. Slate is the first storage application designed to encourage collaboration and research on a distributed network. The creation of Slate is the first step towards a thriving data storage and transaction network powered by IPFS, Filecoin, and Textile that is open and available to everyone. Over the past 8 months, a team of more than a dozen engineers, designers, and developers have worked together to make Slate a reality. As of the launch in September 2020, the application has landed 200GiB of real user data. We interviewed Slate founder Jimmy Lee to learn about the project status after the launch of the Filecoin mainnet. What has October been like for you and your team? Has Slate lived up to its success with the Filecoin mainnet? During Filecoin mainnet launch week in October 2020, Slate conducted so many Filecoin storage transactions that it put pressure on the network for both traders and miners! We completed as many as a thousand transactions in 30 minutes. Today, we are seeing a ton of improvements to Lotus that will allow us to fire up our transaction machinery again and participate in this incredible network in 2021. We want Slate to be the easiest way to transact storage against the Filecoin network. We are honored to work with the Filecoin Network team and create an attractive platform for people to join the concept of distributed file storage. We are excited to introduce these open source software to more people in the coming months and prove that these services are as powerful as their enterprise-grade counterparts. We believe that people want to know how their tools work, and Slate is a perfect example. You can use a protocol that respects your values without using an enterprise service with an opaque process. It sounds like mainnet launch went pretty well for Slate! What upgrades have you made to the project since then? At the end of October, we released Slate 2.0. We redesigned the underlying engine to make the Slate web page more flexible for collecting, organizing, and sharing files. The team also added flexible new tools to let users freely adjust the appearance and usability of Slate. These tools let users resize, reorder, and even overlap images. It's as easy as clicking the Edit button to use Slate 2.0! Then, we added some quick actions for files to make it easier to connect files to Slate from anywhere on the web. In November, we turned our attention to search, making it easier to search Slate with just a click, so users can now seamlessly navigate between files, Slate pages, and user profiles, and more easily discover content that others have put out on the web. So far, we have over 4,800 users and 23,000 public file uploads on Slate. This growth is amazing! We also have 312 stars on Github and 18 contributors. Slate has always aimed to be open source, unlike centralized cloud storage options like Dropbox, Pinterest, or other enterprises. We want everyone to see all the frameworks of our software and be able to customize it themselves. What else would you like to say to users and teams using Slate? There are a lot of different use cases, from PDFs to videos. My favorite use case is the recently developed Unity WebGL integration, which really opens the door to everything that can be applied to the platform. This is part of the Slate promise, that everyone can share and work together on applications. Overall, it was really great to see what some of our 17 contributors were doing outside of the core team. For example, Tara Lin from the Slate team did an amazing job creating a new marketing page. The community response has been overwhelming! Here are some of the great comments we received on Twitter: That’s awesome! Tell us more about what’s next for Slate! We are very interested in the Filecoin retrieval market. We are working with the Textile team to ensure that the entire IPFS block storage can be loaded into a Textile Bucket. Imagine that you will be able to create a wonderful file world on Slate, and then store it on the Filecoin network for anyone to retrieve. And when they retrieve it, it will appear in front of people just as you designed it!
We also care about people not needing to authenticate when using Slate, so we added libp2p authorization. As long as you have a libp2p, you can use Slate as an interface. And we are looking to work with more teams and integrate more of their APIs, such as Infinite Scroll, Space Storage, and Infura (if there are teams that are ready, please contact us!) |
