Peergos

Peergos is building toward a web where applications cannot track you and users decide what each app may see. Its foundation is a peer-to-peer encrypted global filesystem with fine-grained access control, built to resist surveillance of file contents and the friendship graph. On top sit a secure messenger, an encrypted email client and bridge, and a private social network.

The architecture stacks six layers. IPFS provides storage, routing, and retrieval through a minimal Java implementation called Nabu. A key pair authorizes writes, each of them signed. Data lives as a merkle structure of encrypted chunks under random labels, with no cross links visible to the server, which cannot deduce file sizes. Encryption happens on the user's machine with TweetNaCl, each 5MiB chunk encrypted independently. Social and sharing layers sit above.

The project states its aims plainly, and they explain the design.

• No central node: storage runs across a network that is hard to disrupt or surveil.
• Hidden metadata: sharing leaves no visible record of who shared with whom.
• Sandboxed apps: web apps load and run from Peergos under user-granted permissions, without exfiltrating data.
• No certificate authority: identity does not depend on the central TLS trust architecture.
• Self-hostable: a machine at home can host a user's own storage and social platform.

Anonymity is not offered yet; the project says it can only be approximated by using an account solely over Tor. The server runs on the JVM, mostly Java, with the web interface cross-compiled to JavaScript. Audits from 2019 and 2024 are published in the repository.