Storadon

Much of our Internet existence is encapsulated in our collective posts on social media, especially between members of a community who have a long history of interacting with each other on centrally controlled servers like, Twitter or Mastodon. One problem with any centrally managed server is that the server is a single point of failure, which leads to all the content stored on it to be lost forever or delete it on purpose. This could be years of messages and threads for thousands of community members.

The problem with Twitter is that the company is hostile to third-party access of their data via API, which makes it difficult or impossible to archive community history even if you could solve the problem of defining the communities members as a subset of the billions of Twitter users. This is why Mastodon is an ideal server implementation for archiving communities' history. Our protocol takes advantage of the Mastodon API to create a standard archive format that can be updated and then uses Lighthouse to store the data to be accessed by anyone at any time in the future, regardless of the status of the original Mastodon server which may go down temporarily or permanently as happens all the time.

We use the Lighthouse API on Polygon Mumbai testnet to store files on Filecoin and create deals to store them forever. We use the Mastodon API to fetch the archive data of a community. When Lighthouse opens up their API for contract interaction we will have a contract managing bounties for anyone to store new data and have a Mastodon plug-in which signs the API request results which can be verified by the contract when data is stored.