Mirror Development

Posted on May 13, 2021Read on Mirror.xyz

Introducing Block Permalinks

One of the earliest provocations at Mirror went a little like this: what if you had a great idea, and when telling the story introducing it to the world you could also enable the reader to participate in making that story come to life. What if that happened directly within the narrative as part of the story?

This scenario has informed our approach to interface since day one, and lead us to creating a series of Economic Blocks—embeddable interfaces you can place within a story enabling readers to interact by funding and sustaining great ideas. To be active participants of the story being created.

Clearly there was something to this. We’re beginning to lose count of how many successful projects have taken place during Mirror’s first few months! Projects like Colin and Samir’s NFT auction and split, Songcamp’s auctions and splits for three original songs, Emily’s crowdfund for $NOVEL, and many more.

The economic blocks powering these projects have turned out to be just that—very powerful. Although they take form as focused embeddable blocks within stories, each contain much of the same functionality you’d expect from an entire platform. No joke!

With this in mind, we decided to give economic blocks permanent homes by creating Permalinks—direct links to URLs where blocks are accessible outside of entries. You can discover a block’s permalink by clicking the 🔗 link icon in the a block heading. Auctions in particular look good! Here are a few favorite examples:

In truth, this has been on our mind since day one, but overtime the idea was validated by seeing how blocks have been used by you. We’re excited to continue introducing other ideas up our sleeve. It’s easy to imagine how a design system of embeddable “blocks” which represent expanded web3 “apps” may evolve in the future. Yes, we’re thinking about THAT thing you just thought of, too 😉

Onwards!