Executive Summary

Decentralized technologies are unlocking new and revolutionary ways to mitigate threats to expression, privacy, provenance and preservation when sharing and archiving media online. They reduce dependence on ever-growing centralized platforms by offering collaborative alternatives that inherently circumvent threats like censorship, control, media manipulation, and surveillance, which are now endemic to these platforms. In this paper, the authors — OpenArchive and Hypha Worker Co-operative — test these assumptions by researching, developing, and implementing novel DWeb storage technologies in the mobile media archiving ecosystem.

Given the ubiquity of computers and internet access, one may think that it would be easy to preserve most media shared online. However, in this age of information centralization, new threats to digital media are ever evolving. For example, information disappears due to linkrot and censorship, and disinformation proliferates due to AI-fueled deepfakes that manipulate media. While people are creating and sharing more media than ever before, it is increasingly at risk as it resides on proprietary platforms that prioritize profit over preservation, provenance, privacy, or rights. Despite posing increased threats to the historical record, these platforms (such as Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and others) are still the primary destination for most mobile media and those consuming it. In order to ensure that media is authenticated, preserved, and accessible in the future, a more intentional approach is urgently needed to protect pertinent information like citizen journalism, breaking news, and personal archives more generally.

OpenArchive is a research and development organization that builds harm reduction tools and resources to improve the digital archiving ecosystem for those who are disproportionately impacted by the aforementioned challenges — documenters, archivists, journalists, historians, legal advocates, and teachers. As a pioneer of applying a human rights-centered approach to co-creating responsive and ethical tools and resources, OpenArchive is well-positioned to test assumptions about challenges and opportunities that arise when using decentralized storage and peer-to-peer protocols through a community-focused lens. This paper maps the research and development processes of these novel decentralized mobile archiving technologies that aim to better protect, preserve, and verify digital media.

Along with the Hypha Worker Co-operative, OpenArchive tested whether and how decentralization could mitigate digital archiving challenges to security, provenance, and autonomy. To do so, they created a proof of concept called ‘DWeb Storage’ — now in beta production — that integrates decentralized storage into OpenArchive’s free open source secure archiving mobile application Save that helps people securely archive, verify, and encrypt their mobile media. This approach seeks to determine if this novel mobile-first DWeb Storage is a viable way to foster privacy, accessibility, verifiability, and sustainability when preserving mobile media while also mitigating emergent threats.

These research and development outputs are guided by the Human Rights Centered Design Methodology (HRCD), a responsive, intentional design framework co-authored by OpenArchive’s Executive Director. In practice, HRCD uses a collaborative and iterative approach throughout the research, threat modeling, design, and technical development phases to ensure that OpenArchive’s tools and educational resources meet the needs of its beneficiaries. Top priorities include: privacy, security, and accessibility, which are centered throughout the development and integration of DWeb Storage into Save.

Through this process, the authors chose to implement two DWeb protocols — Veilid and Iroh — as the foundation of DWeb Storage because they best suit the needs of “Decentralized Archivist Communities” (DACs) — a term that refers to a group that collects, preserves, and maintains media archives. The authors chose these protocols because they best meet the DAC’s needs by enabling peer-to-peer sharing, encryption, and redundancy while prioritizing usability. This DWeb Storage implementation puts theory into practice to provide a novel and ethical way to securely archive mobile media for future generations. In addition to centralization, the greatest threat to this critical harm-reductive work and the historical record is a lack of sustainable support.

Download and read the white paper here.