• 12 Nov, 2025 *

My latest side project Alcove (a privacy RSS reader in beta) solves the problem of privacy invasions regarding what news you might read or what people you follow. However the other side of the equation, blogs, face an interesting challenge. Blogs of course are generally not private, but they are a tool of free speech. The idea is that anyone should be able to share their ideas and beliefs on a blog, and anyone can subscribe to it via RSS. In traditional web technologies there is the potential threat of censorship through de-platforming or a domain takedown.

I’ll never forget my second month at Pinata. It was around 7am in the morning, and Slack was buzzing like crazy. Our domain had been taken down. This was a crisis situation; our website was offline, no one could access their email, services and APIs were down, it was a nightmare. Turns out the org/company that owned the top level domain received a bunch of reports that our domain was related to phishing content, so much so that a takedown request was filed and they obliged. Took basically all day to get back online, trying to contact some random people in Italy. We learned an important lesson as a file storage company of how to better protect ourselves, but for me personally, it was an eye opening experience to how quickly your domain can be taken from you.

During my time at Pinata I built many tools around IPFS or “InterPlanetary File System.” It’s a protocol for sharing files on a p2p level with content addressability. You can publish a file on the network through a node, and anyone with the address to that file can fetch it. IPFS has some really interesting characteristics, and it received a fair bit of adoption over the past few years in multiple blockchains. Ethereum is probably the biggest one, and one of the biggest protocols on Ethereum is the Ethereum Name Service or ENS. Just like how DNS points a name like google.com to an IP address, ENS points a name like vitalik.eth to an Ethereum address. It goes a bit deeper though.

ENS profiles can have multiple records that can be queried, including a contenthash which can be an IPFS identifier. This lets you host a website on IPFS, put the address on your ENS, and basically create a link between your identity and your personal website that can be visited. Public goods like eth.limo make it easy for people to visit an ENS site, like this one: stevedylandev.eth.limo.

I go through all this explanation because there is a small chance that IPFS and ENS could be missing pieces in a system where people can freely publish and not be censored. Your ENS is cryptographically owned by you; it can’t taken down on a whim. If you run an IPFS node you can visit the site for an ENS on a p2p level and completely bypass traditional servers. With enough people running their own nodes it becomes a fairly resilient network.

Where it starts to break down? Complexity. IPFS and ENS are not that user friendly, not yet. IPFS has also had its fair share of issues over the years. Still, they show the promise and make me wonder if its worth building tooling that make both usable for everyday people.

Another piece of this puzzle is how much people actually care. Heard plenty of arguments against prioritizing decentralized or liberating tech simply due to nobody wanting it, but I would argue people flock to it when they need it the most, and in my opinion we are getting closer to that reality. All I know is that I care about it, and I will pursue building it for those who want it.