I might be wrong about something, but I'll be honest: this didn't happen overnight, there was no loud, scandalous news story that made me suddenly "awaken." In reality, it was a creeping, subtle erosion of trust, drop by drop, and so on. At first, there was the senseless disappearance of my old photo album from the cloud after an interface update — the service said, "More convenient for you." Then came the email about changes to the privacy policy. Later, I realized that my work documents, personal letters, and all my memories weren't really mine anymore. They were now on foreign servers, under foreign rules, protected or not, and governed by someone else's conscience. I understood this when I tried to export my digital world — the archive arrived after a few hours, but it was a chaotic mess of files with strange names, and everything looked deeply odd. Metadata, structure, connections — all the things that made it my space — were gone. They invited me into a nice apartment, but when I wanted to leave, they handed me a pile of bricks instead of keys. My decision had been brewing for years, but the final straw was a simple image in a developer's blog.
Centralized cloud, I'd say, is an illusion of ownership—like renting space in someone else's reality. And like all renters, you're vulnerable too.
My insight was simple: if something critically important to you—say, a work project or family photos and personal diaries—is stored only in one place that you don't control, then it's not storage. It's delegation of storage, with all the associated risks.
And finally, here I found the WALRUS Protocol—technical name, but a human idea, and most importantly, simplicity in everything. Serverless, peer-to-peer cloud: you can already imagine a group of friends who store parts of your encrypted data on their devices. You're also part of this network, storing fragments of their data. None of you can see the data because it's encrypted, and none of you has the full set. To reassemble a file, you need your cryptographic authorization—meaning a intermediary server that could be hacked, turned off, or served a court order.
This is not an abstraction—I've been testing it for three months now. My "cloud" now means my laptop, the hardware from my friend's old PC in the office, and a VPS in another country that I use for work, and they "verify" each other. I've uploaded an archive of my texts, scanned copies of my father's diaries, and the project I've been working on for years.@Walrus 🦭/acc #walrus $WAL
