Why IPFS?
Technical choices & project ethos

This page documents my engagement with BLACKBOX and the BLACKBOX/AC82 experiment in particular. What follows are my personal experiments with IPFS and other Web3 infrastructure.

Moving away from centralised hosting

A regular website is basically a collection of files parked on someone else's computer. That someone, be it a hosting provider or cloud company, has final authority over the data. This is exactly the kind of centralised model that BLACKBOX resists.

BLACKBOX, as I understand it, is a project that fundamentally rejects centralised, proprietary infrastructure. As this website logs my participation in, and thinking about, the project it seemed necessary to avoid infrastruture that contradicts this ethos. So I built it on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS).

Decentralisation as a starting point

IPFS is, at its core, a peer‑to‑peer hypermedia protocol. Instead of locating content by where it sits (a server URL), it addresses content by what it is—its cryptographic hash. This means no single entity can unilaterally take the site down, and anyone can mirror across their own nodes. That aligns beautifully with BLACKBOX's own ambition: to make works resist platform lock‑in. (Whether IPFS fully delivers on that utopian promise in practise is another question – but it is a direction I want to test.)

Aligning infrastructure with ethos

In addition, I decided to avoid third-party code repositories. So, for example, the cube animation on the BLACKBOX page, is written in vanilla Canvas without calling on any external javascript libraries. I also avoided analytics and third‑party cookies because adding those would introduce dependencies that I cannot control, and that would work against the project’s commitment to a decentralised cultural space. (In the first iteration of this site I still used Google Fonts but those have since been replaced by self-hosted font files.)

Pinning and permanence

Now, a quick caveat about IPFS: it distributes files across many volunteered computers, which sounds great on paper. But those files only persist if someone actively chooses to keep them—this is called “pinning,” similar to seeding a torrent. Right now, I rely on a pinning service (Pinata) to keep this site alive. Other options to explore are anchoring the sites identifier on-chain via a smart contract.

Every technical decision here is provisional. I treat it as a heuristic – an ongoing experiment. I fully I expect it to change, break, and be revised as I go!