It's like Dropbox, but private. Like Facebook, but without snooping. Like Trello, but not centralised. It's encrypted, decentralised and - after nine years in the making - it's finally here... introducing [drumroll sound] Peergos.

Here are some screenshots if you want to see what it looks like first.

You can create a free account here.

Features: privacy, security, convenience

Uncompromising privacy

Everything you do on Peergos, whether it's storing files, sharing to-do lists or posting links, is secured by end-to-end encryption. And we do mean everything: uploading a file, viewing PDFs or photos, and streaming audio or video. Unlike other providers, we have designed it from the ground up to protect data and metadata, even from us. There's no ability to monetise your data or metadata, because we can't see it.

Security

Your password and the keys used to encrypt your files never leave your device. Unlike many services that keep a store of password hashes and other data, we never store anything sensitive on our server. Ever. Your files are chunked during upload, separately encrypted and rendered indistinguishable from directories.

Convenience

Our web UI works in all the major browsers and you can log in from multiple devices.

We've built some handy apps on top of our peer-to-peer filesystem:

1. Decentralized social media

2. Calendar

3. Search

4. Text editor

5. To-do boards

6. Video/audio player

7. Image gallery

8. Secure PDF viewer

9. Customizable profiles

10. Personal website hosting

Why use it?

Strong client-side encryption

A file is split into 5 MB chunks and each is padded to a multiple of 4096 bytes and independently encrypted using 256-bit xsalsa20-poly1305. Metadata including filenames, modification times, mimetype, thumbnails etc. are also encrypted. The different chunks of a file are not linkable by the server, so the host can't see the size of individual files. Without the decryption keys, directories are indistinguishable from small files. All of this happens client side.

Open source + reproducible builds

Both our client and server are 100% open source. We also have reproducible builds for both the server and the client.

Fine-grained server-less access control

Access control in Peergos is integrated and seamless. You will never have to see any keys or hashes, Peergos takes care of all the key management under the hood. Sharing data is simple, plus you can generate a secret link to share your files with people not yet on Peergos.

Decentralization

Peergos was built on IPFS, a content-addressed and distributed file store. Only you, and anyone you authorise, can retrieve your encrypted data. You can also authorise an arbitrary number of mirrors for enhanced reliability and bandwidth.

Ability to stream huge files

Peergos can also handle ridiculously large files efficiently. Our maximum file size of 4 petabytes (roughly 4 million gigabytes) is far bigger than any other storage provider we are aware of (but you obviously can't exceed the quota allocated to you on your server). We can stream large files, such as videos, and start playing immediately, or quickly seek through to a later part. Despite being end-to-end encrypted, we can efficiently modify small sections of large files due to the way we split them into chunks before encryption.

Self sovereign identity

If you ever decide to migrate to a different server, all your friends and links come with you - automatically. Your identity on Peergos is independent of any server or domain name, nor is it tied to any device or phone number.

Extreme security

The protocol is independent of DNS and the TLS certificate authorities. If you want to, you can self-host and run Peergos on your own machine and still access all files through any other Peergos server. And don't just take our word for it - Peergos has been audited by Cure53, a world leading security and pentesting company.

Mission statement

Peergos was conceived in 2013, at a time when the Snowden revelations demonstrated just how fundamentally broken the web is. We (a group of four international software developers, with backgrounds in maths, physics and compsci) wanted to build something better – a simple, safe tool allowing everyone to take control over their online privacy. For several years we worked on Peergos in our spare time, meeting up to code in cafes after our day jobs. Our priorities were threefold: security, control and convenience. We believe that no one should ever have to see a secret key, a hash or a public key to use the service safely. Login should work in existing browsers with no add-ons, and you should be able to use multiple devices.

While we were building, it was also becoming apparent that most web services had turned to surveillance capitalism - surveilling, profiling and manipulating their users to show them more, and increasingly targeted, ads. So-called "free" products and services maximise their revenue through user interfaces designed to create addiction so they can show more ads. The web can be better than this – it has to be! We decided that any products we built on top of Peergos will be paid so that the end-users are the customers, not the product themselves.

We were also worried about signing up to services and spending years on them, only to see them shut down, get bought or turn against their users. We felt that the best defence against this is being 100% open source (including the server), combined with being peer-to-peer. We've designed everything, from the protocol up, to empower the end user. We made it easy for the users to leave or change servers whilst keeping their identity and contacts. Think of it as adversarial interoperability with ourselves – it creates a strong incentive for us to keep doing right by our users.

Supporters

We've had support along the way with grants from Protocol Labs (the makers of IPFS), Santander, the Oxford Foundry, and, most recently, the EU's Next Generation Internet program.

Want to try it out?

We have released a limited number of free accounts on our server, so go try it out! Free accounts only get 200 MB, and our pro plan is £5 per month for 50 GB of storage. You can also self-host and still share with anyone on any other server. We've structured it this way to keep our incentives aligned with our users. There will never be any advertising - even if there was, it couldn't be targetted because all your data is encrypted.

If you want to skip signing up you can just try out a secret link

You can find more information in our book.

Thanks for reading. Looking forward to all your questions and comments - we'll do our best to answer below.