Dev tools · September 24, 2025
A self-hosted social network where your Ethereum address is your ID
Hi HN, I'm the creator of epress. After a lot of work, I'm excited (and a bit nervous) to finally share it with you. For years, I've been feeling like a digital tenant on the platforms I use every day. My content, my social graph, my online identity—they were all stored on someone else's servers, subject to their rules, algorithms, and business models. I could be de-platformed, my data could be sold, or an API I relied on could suddenly be put behind a paywall. I looked into existing decentralized alternatives. While many are great projects, I found they often shifted the trust from a big…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I'm the creator of epress. After a lot of work, I'm excited (and a bit nervous) to finally share it with you. For years, I've been feeling like a digital tenant on the platforms I use every day. My content, my social graph, my online identity—they were all stored on someone else's servers, subject to their rules, algorithms, and business models. I could be de-platformed, my data could be sold, or an API I relied on could suddenly be put behind a paywall. I looked into existing decentralized alternatives. While many are great projects, I found they often shifted the trust from a big corporation to a server admin (in federated models) or relied on a network of voluntary relays that could be unreliable or eventually charge fees. The fundamental dependency on third-party infrastructure remained. epress is my attempt at a solution, built on a simple, almost nostalgic principle: true ownership requires self-hosting. It's a decentralized social network where: * You run your own node: Your node is your sovereign territory. All your data lives with you. * Your Ethereum address is your identity: We use EIP-4361 (Sign-In with Ethereum) for authentication. No more username/password juggling. * There are no third-party dependencies: No relays, no hubs, no federated servers. Content is distributed peer-to-peer via a lightweight "notify-pull" protocol between nodes. * All content is verifiable: Every piece of public content is signed and bundled with a "Proof of Source," a cryptographic receipt that proves who published what, and when. This project is heavily inspired by the spirit of the early internet, but built with modern technology to make self-hosting feasible and accessible again. It's still early days, and there's a long road ahead. To show you this is not just a demo, the code is now open source and we already have live nodes waiting for you to follow. The official project blog is at https://epress.blog, is an epress node, and you can also check out my personal node at https://garbin.blog. I'm here all day to answer any questions and, more importantly, to listen to your feedback and critiques. For real-time support during setup or more immediate feedback, feel free to join our Telegram group: https://t.me/+mZMgNSIVy1MwMmVl Whitepaper (for a deep dive): https://github.com/epressworld/epress/blob/main/docs/en/WHIT... Video Demo: https://youtu.be/BB1Zn3oFDVc Thanks for taking the time to check it out.
Does the same job
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Heya! We're longtime lurkers and do sometimes post, today however I want to present to you with the fruits of almost 4 years of work, hacking, designing, physically building (for the record: 2 years full time). We'd love to get some feedback from you guys and feel free to give us any hints on what we could/should change, or any opinion on whether you think that'd be something you'd use. protonet.info So here's our rough plan: We love the web and the possibilities it gives us, we also love the way the cloud allows us instant and ubiquitous access to our data and apps. Now what we don't like…
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