What is this?

Blockheights is an open source starter app for demonstrating how to build a simple multi-author blog with curated content, on DeSo — a fully decentralized blockchain built for censorship-resistant social media.

It's meant for developers and LLMs to learn how to build on DeSo. Feel free to fork it to build your own app.

The app itself is minimal maintenance, as it pulls data from other nodes (apps) on DeSo. The authors on this platform don't even need to login, as they can just post with their DeSo identity and curate their own content on other apps like Focus, while this app just indexes the users and content to display it.

How was this built?

This is entirely a frontend app (NextJS, React, Tailwind). There is no centralized database or backend powering this app.

All content, users, social graphs, comments, engagement, and curation are stored on the censorship-resistant DeSo blockchain, and data is fetched directly from the chain with the GraphQL API.

In fact, in order to build this app, we didn't even write any code ourselves. It was written entirely with an LLM by plugging into the DeSo MCP, with pre-built components from DeSo UI.

Yes, we vibe-coded it, to show how easy it is to build decentralized social apps on DeSo.

But this app does showcase quite a few neat things:

  • Using DeSo Identity wallet to authenticate on-chain users
  • Using DeSo GraphQL to fetch data from the blockchain
  • Using DeSo API & DeSo JS SDK to sign transactions such as following, liking, tipping, etc.
  • Using Optimistic UI to update the UI in real-time
  • Using DeSo Associations, an on-chain primitive, to curate content from select authors

Here's where you can find all of the code and resources:

If you want to dig deeper, and learn about the architecture that powers the DeSo blockchain and it's nodes, you can read our architecture overview which covers the fundamental stack.

Also, credits to midjourney creators for the background videos. They're dope.