Seed Hypermedia: bringing scalable collaboration to the decentralized Web
Gabo Beaumont, Horacio Herrera García, Alexandr Burdiyan, Julio García, Eric Vicenti · 2024
This paper presents "Seed Hypermedia," an innovative architecture for scalable and decentralized collaboration on the web. It integrates elements such as digital signatures, peer-to-peer (P2P) gossip protocols, and distributed hash tables (DHT) to create a robust, secure, and user-managed content system. The core of Seed Hypermedia is a decentralized, indexable network designed to support deep-linking and fine-grained access to content, leveraging IPFS for immutable data storage and CRDTs for managing version-controlled documents. This system enables collaborative editing with a high degree of data integrity through a directed acyclic graph (DAG) of changes, allowing users to maintain ownership and control over their contributions. The architecture promotes a more democratic web environment by decentralizing the indexing and retrieval of content, significantly reducing the reliance on central servers. By integrating advanced cryptographic techniques and a peer-to-peer networking model, Seed Hypermedia aims to empower creators and communities, ensuring permanence, traceability, and scalability in digital content management.