One of the major benefits of using a Web3 Protocol like mirror.xyz is that the data lives on a public blockchain (not a centralized server owned by a company that you have no access to). In the case of mirror.xyz they utilize Arweave an on-chain decentralized storage layer that as they say “makes it so your posts exist forever, even if Mirror does not”. Today’s post is going to explore if that is actually true (Spoiler: It is!) and how one might go about doing so.

Mirror has a blog post about “Retrieving Post Directly From Arweave” so let’s go through it and see what happens.

Step 1 says to grab the Mirror content digest from the end of post URL you want to access. That’s easy enough. The post URL of my first ever Mirror blog post is mirror.xyz/coffeeandcrypto.eth/ao9gxTuTLVpREg0CnPKID691BlFYS7HQzglWKBzTfHk and so my digest is ao9gxTuTLVpREg0CnPKID691BlFYS7HQzglWKBzTfHk

Step 2 has a link for the Arweave Graphql endpoint which actually goes to a Google search page when the link is actually this one if you want to follow along.

Step 3 includes some tags we can use in the query itself to narrow down the scope of data returned. It’s always good to filter your data kids!

Now I looked at the information and the Arweave Graphql screen and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. Thankfully, at the bottom of their post Mirror includes a link to a Github Gist showing the syntax. When I paste that query into the Graphql editor I get the following message.

This makes sense because you can see there is a tag for “Original Content Digest” with a value of $digest that currently has no value. I’m going to guess if I paste my digest in there it is going to work.

That did not work, now I get the following error message instead.

Now, I am going to guess that if I just get rid of the $digest variable (because I’m not sure where to put it or how to use it and I’m on a time crunch!) that it will work. Ta da! As expected I now received a Transaction ID!

I was commenting on the Github Gist above about the steps I had to go through to get it work and remembered that usually this types of explorers have a place to put in query variables to test with. It took some playing around with the syntax but I finally got it to work.

At the bottom under Query Variables put in the syntax like this and just replace my value with yours.

{"digest": "ao9gxTuTLVpREg0CnPKID691BlFYS7HQzglWKBzTfHk"}

To move onto the final step in the article requires some setup and usage of the SDK, so I guess what I know my project for tomorrow (and maybe a couple of days is) in this series, because I want to get to a point where I can download my posts and save them offline, just to show that it can be done.