We’re building a new Internet!
It’s a claim that deserves a lot of skepticism — systems as complicated as The Internet have a lot of rough edges, but many of them are battle scars from decades of contact with messiness of the real world. We aren’t building an entirely new internet, but the past decade has seen some enormous changes on the World Wide Web and the Internet, not least of which include the rise of self-authenticating data and the maturation of and .
Some of the fruits of that labor are finally starting to ripen — everyone knows that at Storacha we use the Filecoin network to ensure the long-term durability of the data we store and we’re excited to keep exploring the problems distributed ledgers can solve for our users. More immediately, — a new social media platform built on a new, decentralization-friendly identity and data platform called the AT Protocol (atproto for short) — has onboarded millions of new users onto “decentralizing tech.” Here at Storacha we love Bluesky and atproto — they’re built on the same building blocks as our data storage system and as a result, our systems play very nicely together.
CIDs and DIDs and CARs — oh my!
(CIDs for short) are one of the most foundational overlaps between our systems — every piece of content uploaded to Storacha is identified by a CID before it’s uploaded, which means Storacha users don’t have to trust us that the data they’re storing is really the data they uploaded. atproto PDSes use and allow CIDs to be .
(DIDs for short) are also used extensively in both systems — in both cases, people and data repositories are identified by DIDs — in Storacha this means we use to represent Spaces and Agents and to represent accounts in our system. Bluesky uses to identify data repositories. Since most data repositories are directly related to a single user or organization, we often talk about Bluesky users having DIDs, and indeed a critical part of the “backup and restore” flow for a Bluesky account involves proving to the did:plc service that the underlying repository related to a particular “user” has changed — in a very real way these DIDs represent data repositories and users at the same time.
Finally, content is usually packed into (CARs for short) before being uploaded to Storacha. This enables essentially unlimited upload sizes (since large files can be broken down into more than one CAR) and ensures compatibility with the rest of the IPFS ecosystem. Similarly, Bluesky uses CARs for because it’s a convenient format for working with CIDs and DIDs and other data.
I Can Fly Twice as High!
Storacha and Bluesky are two great tastes that taste even better together — both leverage self-authenticating data structures, decentralization-ready identifiers and efficient file formats to great effect and are building the basic infrastructure needed to evolve our trusty old Internet to its’ next phase. If you’re on Bluesky, follow us to join the conversation about building a brighter future online!
