Pattern Library

Every piece of software needs some degree of interface, content, and service design. This is no different in decentralization. What is different, however, is that decentralized design introduces concepts and scenarios that diverge from today’s dominant, centralized paradigms. These differences have the potential to make incorporating and solving decentralized design problems more challenging for experienced and novice developers alike. That’s why in an effort to help us all better understand how to build decentralized applications, we’ve created the design patterns in this library to be generalizable to protocols, applications, and the user interfaces of decentralized applications. The patterns themselves have been divided below into categories to further increase accessibility and comprehension.

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Featured Pattern

Social Radius Slider

Control information overload in large networks.

Identity & Agency
In a centralized application, the concept of “who am I” is coordinated by a single authoritative database. In decentralized applications, by contrast, user “accounts” may not exist, or they might get verified in a variety of ways. The patterns in this category help bring clarity to users dealing with questions of how to best manage their own online identity and credentials as well as those of other people.
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Address
Users are uniquely identified by their handle and a server name.
Host Roulette
Encourage an equal distribution of users per server.
Persistent Identity
Securely move between providers and aliases.
Moderation & Curation
Information overload, spam, and abuse can be serious problems for decentralized applications that allow strangers to interact with each other directly. The patterns in this category therefore deal primarily with applications where content and users are publicly discoverable. By integrating the patterns, applications will be more useful to a wider set of communities, and will help keep vulnerable people safer from online abuse.
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Cautious Optimism
Build opportunities for detecting and reacting to bad behavior
Conditional File Sharing
Help users collectively keep data online
Content Curators
Choice, flexibility, and control over feeds.
Sharing & Permissions
Most decentralized applications share everything publicly by default. This default assumption, however, can risk limiting use cases as well as user trust in the application (thereby also reducing adoption). The patterns in this category help build trust with the application by providing methods for users to decide who sees what, and when.
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Paper Keys
Accessible verification, backup, and sharing
QR Code Verification
Securely verify or transfer information between two peers.
Secret Sharing
Backup your keys and other secrets with your trusted peers.
Sync & Status
Decentralized applications aren’t always connected to a single server that is the source of truth for all information. This can lead to hard problems around resolving data conflicts, finding peers, and deciding on common standards. The patterns in this category help users understand where data is available, how it is synced across devices, and whether it is discoverable.
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Age Indicator
Quickly distinguish if information is viral or stale
Discovery Server
A centralized server to discover new content and backup user data.
Network Health Indicator
Build trust through data visualizations.