The article answers the question of “what exactly is a “Dlog”? No this is not a typo. Blogs are so Web2. A Dlog, is a concatenation of Decentralized and Blog. Wow! Real original. What is interesting is that at the time of this writing Googling Dlog did not return anything remotely close to a distributed or decentralized web log. As far as I know, this is the first documented use of Dlog in the web3 context. While I know that I am not the first to put a blog site on the distributed/decentralized web, I believe that I may be the first to refer to a distributed/decentralized blog as a Dlog.

Unless you are stuck in pre 2000’s web 1.0 world, then you are definitely aware of what a blog is, so I won’t bore you with that. What I will bore you with is the difference between your run of the mill blog and a dlog. First and foremost a dlog is the same as a blog, a collection of personal musings of an individual, only a Dlog is stored and distributed in a decentralized manner. You are receiving this this content from one or many IPFS nodes. IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) does not operate on centralized or top-level domains (.com, .org, etc), rather they operate on the content itself. The content can be stored anywhere, on any IPFS node. Much like Peer-to-Peer BitTorrent, or even the Onion protocol, taking down one node will not remove the content. It makes the content incredibly resilient and censor resistant from both nations and tech companies wishing to silence those with which they disagree.

You most likely got here by a reference to DeCaPa.io, which is my legacy DNS name. However you could have gotten here just as easily utilizing any one of the following:

• My Dlog Site Content Identifier (Brave): ipns://k51qzi5uqu5dix750h2z9pwevsj3bhc74djcu80plav5agh6mpr40z11bx8wtu/
• My ENS name (Brave): ipns://matteo.eth
• Using an ENS / DNS bridge (any browser): https://matteo.eth.link or https://matteo.eth.limo

At the time of writing only the Brave Browser natively supported IPFS/IPNS. Chrome required the IPFS Companion plugin. Hang tight, I will write more about the awesomeness of IPFS in future articles.

Rest assured, this dlog is built on Web3, it utilizes IPFS to store the content you are reading, and it is all stored by node peers that can be running pretty much anywhere. I became so fascinated with Web3 that I decided what better way to learn more about it than to start playing with it. As I began learning, I started putting my thoughts down and before I knew it, I was putting a blog together to understand IPFS. With this technology, I can post content on the decentralized web and not require a server or a domain from which to serve the content. It is the content that is important, and why Content is King!

Why is this significant? It is because the web is becomming increasingly centralized. When you think about it, the internet is controlled by a small number of like-minded, and immensely powerful group of companies. The companies give their services away in exchange for your data, and your precious time & attention, from which they make Trillions of dollars. Your personal privacy, browser settings, even your clicks are fully understood and exploited using big data algorithms, so that that they know you better than you know yourself.