Kevalin

https://kevalin.net

Kevalin is a fully peer-to-peer in-browser content publishing platform.

It uses modern web technologies (WebRTC Data Channels) to form connections directly between users and exchange the latest updates to posts using overlay routing (Kademlia) and a gossip content distribution protocol.

All data is cryptographically signed by a pseudonymous digital identity, equivalent to a user account on a hosted platform.

Goals

• No installation required - any user must be able to use the service directly from a web browser
• No user account requirement - public content should be open to all users without requiring an account signup
• Search engine friendly - server side rendering or search-engine compatible javascript rendering should allow published documents to be indexed by search engines
  • This is somewhat incompatible with a distributed platform and may require some gateway service to provide an indexable view of documents.
  • As a minimum, documents should be linkable

Anti-goals (for now)

Kevalin is not:

• Secure - IP addresses of users are known to each other, and while these may not be directly linked to an identity there is potential to leak geographic location or other personally identifiable information (PII).
• Private - No content encryption or access restrictions are currently implemented. Assume anything posted on Kevalin could be read by anybody else.
• Stable - Kevalin is an experiment, and currently not in a stable state which should be trusted for long-term or reliable publication of your information.
• Reliable - Documents published to Kevalin are only kept around so long as someone is interested in them and able to serve them to other people in the network. Eventually they'll disappear.

All this is subject to change, but for now Kevalin won't be focusing on solving these issues.

Inspirations

• Secure Scuttlebutt - A gossip-based distributed blogging protocol
• Kademlia - A distributed hash table implementation used by many peer-to-peer applications
• Freenet - A peer-to-peer distributed publishing platform
• IPFS - A distributed file system

Further Reading

• Design Notes