I was really excited when the late Maelstrom project came out and the possibilities it promised. Imagine the BitTorrent network, but instead of torrent files, we had websites (or hypertext content) on those nodes that could be seeded and leeched. This way, your website would be everywhere and nowhere at the same time, seeded by those who value it and leeched by visitors. Shortly after its beta release, the project was shut down. I never understood why, but in my opinion, it was a brilliant idea.

Later, thanks to blockchain, the craze for decentralization surged again with two services: Zeronet and BlockStack. Zeronet is explained in detail in this document. In short, it can be considered the next generation of Maelstrom: a chain of websites without central servers, hosted on seeders who once downloaded the website. The main difference from regular torrents is encrypted communications and the ability to update hosted websites. For example, Play is one of these websites, a reference for downloading [illegal] movies, which requires Zeronet to access.

The BlockStack project, which calls itself the Internet for decentralized apps, is similar to Zeronet but focuses more on apps than textual content. OpenBazaar, which I introduced here, is one of these apps. If you have an idle server and want to contribute to this project, a full guide to creating a node in the BlockStack network is available here. Reading its whitepaper is also helpful to understand how the system works.