OpenSea is down

Twitter relies on hitting OpenSea APIs for loading NFTs, but OpenSea is down so now Twitter can’t load NFTs. This is a problem we’re going to face in the DSNP universe. The decentralized system will tend to grow single points of failure. Places where things mostly work well will achieve dominant positions and become the place to access certain types of material or services. And when they fail, they’ll take down everybody who built on top of them.

There are a number of ways to address this, and they all mostly have to do with failover. If you’re relying on a service to access DSNP or improve the DSNP experience, and there’s no way to fail over to another provider, it’s eventually going to cost you some nines. Even if you don’t build the failover, asking yourself what redundancies are theoretically available is valuable. When the answer is “none”, that’s a good sign that you’re leaning toward a risky overdependence.

As we work, we should keep in mind that one of the goals of DSNP is a healthy ecosystem. We don’t want to be the single point of failure. We want a diverse set of providers of pretty much every type of service. And we want choices to be fluid enough that if we go down people can mostly keep on going.

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