Using Next.js for server-side generation of share preview

[mpeterdev]

If the Near Social Viewer project is converted to Next.js, we could use dynamic routes to fetch component metadata and use that metadata in social share previews.

I do not believe this could be used to give granular previews to specific posts, but info about the #app is a step in the right direction

[mpeterdev]

@calebjacob can you take a quick look into whether query params—which are used to direct to individual posts in a Near Social app—might be leveraged on-demand for generating share previews?

[mpeterdev]

awesome 🔥

I think the major remaining question would be how a widget specifies the content to be pulled from SocialDB based on their data schema, right?

[calebjacob]

That raises an interesting question. Should we expose the direct use of getServerSideProps() to widget developers? We might need to consider letting users choose if their widget is a Next JS page component or just a regular component. This would probably introduce new attack vectors to consider (leaking environment variables).

The alternative is to expose some type of abstraction for getServerSideProps(), but then you start heading further down the road of non-standard API's.

[mpeterdev]

Initial impression is that exposing an abstraction would be the way to go, since otherwise we give component developers the ability to run arbitrary JS in the server environment which should be considered secure

[evgenykuzyakov]

What's the abstraction level there? To fetch the post you may need to fetch data from chain multiple times, e.g. fetch the author profile and the post itself. The ideal solution is to have some smaller JS code that you would run on the server side, but within some VM (maybe tiny JS and wasm). Then limit this VM by memory and compute time.

Short term we can use app metadata to at least display the name of the app, description and icon, but not the content being shared.

[calebjacob]

That would definitely be a good short term win @evgenykuzyakov.