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.