Publishing to the Distributed Web
The Distributed Web, or the Decentralized Web, or Web 3.0, refer to new web technologies and communities seeking to reduce or eliminate central points of control on the web. Through building open protocols that allow for more of our digital infrastructure to be hosted at the edges, such as our personal computer or a community server, proponents of the Distributed Web hope to address many shortcomings of our current web.
Content and social interactions on our current web is largely mediated by a handful of big technology companies wielding disproportionate power compared to the average user. This often leads to platform lock-in of audiences and favors content designed to capture attention. The centralized infrastructure also enables various forms of censorship, and economic or political reasons have often led to destruction of important creative and scientific works.
As creators, we often have to decide whether to manage all the infrastructure independently, at the cost of our technical labor and access to audiences, or to rely on one of the dominant platforms operated by a multinational company. By publishing to the Distributed Web using the Distributed Press, creators can retain ownership of their content, monetization channels, and access an open network of audience, while minimizing technical overhead.
The Distributed Web enables us to share content that resist centralized forms of censorship. Since verifiable content can be received from multiple origins, as in BitTorrent, mass censorship techniques commonly used in political censorship become less effective, while self-censorship and social filtering may be weakened with opportunities for peer-to-peer content sharing among trusted circles. One such examples of Distributed Web publishing is the Uncensorable Wikipedia on IPFS in response to the Turkish government's restricting of access to Wikipedia in 2017.
Distributed Press uses IPFS and Hypercore as our initial content sharing protocols. In addition to the familiar https, you can view our published content using the ipfs and hypercore schemes on compatible browsers.
Here is an example of our website, staging.compost.digital, published using Distributed Press. It can be viewed on the Hypercore network at hyper://staging.compost.digital using Beaker and Agregore browsers (left example below).
On the IPFS network, the same website can be accessed at ipns://staging.compost.digital using Firefox and Chrome with the IPFS Companion, or directly using Brave and Opera for Android. In this right example above, we are viewing a particular version of the website identified by the content ID (instead of the domain name) shown at the address bar. For general information about browser support for the Distributed Web, please refer to are we distributed yet?
Another option to browse content on the Distributed Web is to use a public HTTP gateway to view these content from the IPFS and Hypercore networks.
You can try the HTTP gateways we operate at Distributed Press:
- https://ipfs.distributed.press/ipns/staging.compost.digital/
- https://hyper.distributed.press/staging.compost.digital/
Even though we are using https here, the content still originate from the distributed networks, which means you can view the same content via the ipfs.io gateway, the ipfs.deprecated.systems gateway, and any other! Since anyone can operate a gateway, the content is still highly available and resistant against mass censorship.
Content distributed using Distributed Web protocols are resistant to tampering. This is important since the audience may receive the requested content from anyone on the content network, so the authenticity of the content must be secured using modern cryptography.
The ease of replication allows important content to quickly build redundancy across networks, making them highly available for global access and we can easily preserve archives with version history. These same features to create redundant copies also allow creator works to stay online all the time while avoiding dependence on proprietary content platforms.