For a few years now, I've been obsessed with the idea of creating a way to store data, perform transformations on data, and allow others to subscribe to real-time updates to that data in a completely peer-to-peer way. I fundamentally believe that such a system is needed for building fully-functional, trust-minimized applications on stateful data without needing to rely on databases and data centers.

The result of much exploration and experimentation – I'm excited to share Ceramic with you.

Ceramic is a decentralized platform for data stream processing that is built on top of IPFS (interplanetary file system). Ceramic provides a way for developers to create and host streams of information and ever-changing files on the decentralized web – and share updates in real-time with anyone in the world.

Ceramic is still in early testing, but more than 2,000 developers have already started playing with the technology – their projects range from decentralized identity, to decentralized social media, content publishing, decentralized collaboration tools, cross-app/org data sharing, etc.

I would greatly appreciate any thoughts and/or feedback from the HN community so that I can work on making the system better.

I'm super excited about where Ceramic is going and what it means for the (decentralized) web. There are lots of ideological and technical reasons that developers get excited about p2p networks/protocols, but for the average user, apps/platforms simply need to work and deliver perceived value. In our Ceramic integration, we've been able to deliver immediate usability for p2p content linking and pinning that's at least on-par with what you'd experience with web 2.0/centralized DB-based publishing. It only gets better from there as p2p apps/platforms scale and users get more data composability. With Ceramic going a long way to meeting those initial UX table stakes, apps can start to lean into the higher-level value propositions of p2p technology. Bullish.