Get ready to blog in space

Large is an open source peer-to-peer blogging platform that helps you build apps and websites that are hosted by the people that use them. 

New peer-to-peer tech lets us make apps that work in familiar ways and gives us a bunch of new benefits.

• You just send your messages to the people who want to see them. No one sits in the middle collecting every message from every person to later blast them with ads about the contents until the end of time.
• It’s serverless. Not in the fancy cloud marketing way. You don’t have a server. You have an app on your phone and it stores all the things you read and post. If you have more than one device your data is available on both. 
• The more users a P2P network gets the more reliable it becomes. Anyone who’s used bittorrent knows that it’s way faster when you have more peers. Same idea here. You can have servers, but it’s not a requirement.
• No implicit need to monetize. So no ads. Without servers to maintain there aren’t bills to pay. You can create a professional website or app, create content, and share it with your audience without a hosting bill. 
• Traditional web apps are almost always supported by ads. Running a big centralized service like Facebook or LinkedIn is expensive. There’s a lot of infrastructure to manage. Someone needs to pay for that infrastructure. And since no one is going to put money up for free, they need a return on their investment. The ads provide it.
• Offline mode is barely different from online mode. You just can’t get new stuff.

Companies that sell servers to build centralized apps have convinced the entire development world that the only way to scale apps is to buy or rent servers from them. That’s convenient for them. It’s not true.

Large, and other P2P networks don’t need any of those things. The data lives on the devices of the people who use it. You send messages directly to the other users. If those messages become popular more people have copies. They make it available to everyone else. The more popular it gets the more available it becomes. We use public-key cryptography to make sure messages come from who we think they’re from. 

We can make multi-user apps that are ad-free and also actually free that let us do all the same things we already do. There’s no infrastructure to support. It’s just an app that runs on your own phone and computer.

There are some caveats of course. It might be slower at the beginning. Users can download the content from any other user. When you don’t have a lot of users this is possibly slower. If you’ve ever been one of the first people to download and seed a bittorrent file this will be familiar. P2P apps are slower when there are fewer users.

Traditional server-based apps have the opposite problem. Those get slower as you add users. You start by paying for servers and as your app gets more users the servers become bigger and more expensive. 

With Large you can (optionally) pay to host your data at the beginning to help bootstrap the network, but once you actually have an app with actual users that expense mostly disappears. Arguably it’s not all that important in the beginning either since you don’t actually have users yet.

Large is free. There are lots of great blogging/CMS platforms out there. Many of them are free. I think Large is freer than most. It’s open source and you can start by hosting it on the devices that you already have instead of paying someone else to borrow theirs. 

It's is built using IPFS and Ethereum.

• All the actual data is stored in IPFS.
• Data services are built using OrbitDB.
• Ethereum is used as a virtual whitepages and to authenticate all messages. It also allows other crypto-specific features to be added later. In theory you could could later connect this to any smart contract platform.
• The front-end is built using Framework7. Everything is HTML/CSS/Javascript. Electron, Android, iOS apps are planned.

Here's the github repo. All contributions are welcome.

https://gitlab.com/ptoner/large

A basic prototype is almost ready. In the short term my goal is to build out a website for the project and use Large to host it. It'll also host a community of people interested in building apps this way. If you’re interested hit like and I’ll make sure to invite you when it’s ready.

If you can build a WordPress site you can build one of these.