📇Decentralized storage

WebMingle relies on decentralized storage to store your files on the web for free. Decentralized storage is a technology for storing data that replaces traditional servers and uses a distributed network with many participants providing storage capacity. The model inherently builds in redundancy that provides resiliency against failures and attacks, as well as enhanced performance due to geolocation provided by a large network of distributed storage providers. While you don't need to understand decentralized storage to integrate WebMingle into your applications and services, if you're curious about what's going on behind the scenes, read on.

Broadly speaking, most of today's networks operate using what is known as location addressing. Location addressing retrieves online information from a specific location on the web—that is, from behind a URL.

However, there are some key problems with this approach. Location addressing is centralized, meaning anyone who controls the location can control the content. The controller can change the content, replace it completely, or just take it away. This means that location-based addresses are vulnerable to attack, exploitation, and loss.

Part of the approach to decentralizing this traditional way of operating the web requires the implementation of a new form of addressing: content addressing. Content addressing is the technique of issuing a Content Identifier (CID) to each piece of data, which is a token derived directly from the content of a file using an algorithm that always generates the same key for the same content. Using content addressing, files can be queried and retrieved based on their content rather than location—a major factor in freeing the web from centralized content control. However, content addressing is only part of the solution.

WebMingle uses CIDs generated by IPFS (Interplanetary File System) to enable content addressing for all data stored on its network - however, just because a file has a CID doesn't mean the file is guaranteed to exist forever. In a well-functioning decentralized system, participants all need to agree to be good participants and provide reliable storage capacity. For this, WebMingle uses the Filecoin network. The Filecoin network and its namesake token FIL (or ⨎ for short) were created to incentivize storage providers on the network to agree to storage transactions. These deals stipulate that a certain amount of storage capacity will be provided for an agreed period of time to ensure the second part of the solution: content persistence.