Theme · Censorship resistance: content resilience starts with you

Even if it's taken down, the content stays in your hands

“Some journalists publish here; even if a journalist disappears, their articles may outlive them a little.”

Content-addressing vs location-addressing

The web we use every day (HTTP) is “location-addressing”: content is tied to a particular IP or domain, and the moment you delete the file — or rewrite the DNS Translates addresses people can remember into the addresses computers use — like the internet's phone book. — it stops working. IPFS A network that breaks files up and copies them onto many computers around the world. As long as a single one still holds a copy, the content can be read. switches instead to “content-addressing”: every piece of content has a unique content fingerprint (CID), and as long as one computer still holds it, it can be read. In other words, deleting files and changing domains — the traditional tools of blocking — can't stop it. This resilience runs as a relay of three technologies: distributed storage (IPFS, 2018) → IPNS stable addresses (2022) → ENS memorable names (2022).

Three layers of content resilience

Content resilience can be split into three layers, counting from the inside out: the first layer (ENS memorable names, the Tor onion network, the Fediverse, and so on) can carve out alternative routes; the second layer (content on distributed storage) cannot be taken down; the third layer (the front page, search, recommendations) can be co-opted. That brings out a key point: “constitutional free-speech protections can reach the second layer (whether the content still exists), but not the third (how the entry points are ordered).” What we most want to convey this time is exactly this layered kind of governance: a platform can block content, but the user always holds a decentralized address in their own hands.

This “can't be taken down” is not just theory: over the 2025 Lunar New Year, Matters' entire domain was mistakenly blocked for three days by a rewritten domain lookup (DNS-RPZ), and for the first time the platform itself became the target of censorship — while the articles themselves were in fact still written on IPFS, never destroyed. The episode was like a mirror, forcing everyone to think clearly about whether blocking is warranted at all, and how far it should go; the full account is kept in the Matters governance chronicle.

Further reading: the 2025 Lunar New Year DNS-RPZ mistaken-blocking incident (governance history)

Further reading: Hack the Platform — small experiments you can remix Is censorship resistance really indispensable?