Kevalin

Status: Proof of concept / Design

Kevalin is a proof of concept distributed web platform built with modern web technologies.

It allows contributors to publish content to the network without the need to host a website themselves, while maintaining control over their own content in the sense that the files making up their posts are freely downloadable from the network at any time, or can be marked for removal by participating peers.

The network is not tied to any particular server, the content itself is identified by its hash and may be fetched from any participating peer.

The core principle is that it must not require the installation of any additional software to join the network, nor require a user account for read-only access to public content, just like the traditional World Wide Web.

There are several intended interaction modes for publishing and consuming different types of content.

Tech stack

Kevalin’s key building blocks are:

• Web RTC data channel for browser-to-browser communication
• Relay server protocol for network bootstrapping and connection fallback based on Websockets
• Routing protocol for sending messages between nodes
• DHT for managing the network of connected nodes and locating specific content
• Gossip protocol for content discovery and distribution

Prior Art

• Aether - Open source, self-governing communities with auditable moderation and mod elections
• Freenet - Freenet is a distributed, decentralized alternative to the centralized World Wide Web
• Secure Scuttlebutt - A gossip-based distributed blogging protocol
• Kademlia - A distributed hash table implementation used by many peer-to-peer applications
• IPFS - A distributed file system

See Also

• Some early design notes on Bitbucket