I’m not quite understanding the usecase for “Open membership hubs”… would this be the method used to create collections of data that can be shared across apps?
Open-membership hubs allow writes from any user but still only allow writes to occur on a bucket if that request is authorized for the bucket. These are useful for running a service provider for multiple users, and this is how, say, hub.blockstack.org works.
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I may be misunderstanding, so the user would have to specify that they want to use an open-membership hub, and as of now that would be the chosen storage driver for any app that they use? Or should the open-membership storage path be defined on every driver as an option selectable by each individual app?
I may be misunderstanding, so the user would have to specify that they want to use an open-membership hub, and as of now that would be the chosen storage driver for any app that they use? Or should the open-membership storage path be defined on every driver as an option selectable by each individual app?
Apps don’t select which gaia driver to use – that selection is performed by the gaia hub. Apps speak to the gaia hub, and the gaia hub uses drivers to speak to backend storage providers.
A hub will accept requests for a path /$address/filename.txt only if a request contains a valid authentication token for $address. Applications always write to paths like /$app_user_address/filename.txt, where the $app_user_address is derived from the user’s application private key (and therefore, the app can generate a valid authentication token).
An open-membership hub allows writes for any addresses (though again, it validates those writes). This means that it will operate as a storage system for any user wishing to use it. If I ran my own gaia hub, I probably wouldn’t want to store data on behalf of other people’s applications, profiles, etc., so I would only want to accept requests for writes to addresses which correspond to my applications.
The blockstack-browser configures which hub a user will connect to and use (this is currently not-configurable in the browser, but will be eventually). Currently, this defaults to hub.blockstack.org
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Hey @aaron,
Does this work now? This seems like it’d be a good solution for managing teams. The documentation is there for open membership hubs, but I’m wondering if this is supported yet by both blockstack.js and the browser. Thanks!
Yep, @jehunter5811, this works now – the default Gaia hub is an open-membership hub.
Closed membership hubs are a bit more cumbersome to operate – they use whitelists for the allowed writer-addresses. Because each user’s app writes with a different writer-address, this means that the whitelist would need to contain each of those addresses.