Hashbase

» see hashbase.io as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Blue Link Labs shipped Beaker, a browser that could also publish. You wrote a page, your own computer served it over the Dat protocol, and anybody who visited helped carry the bandwidth. The demo was the best in the decentralized web and the hole in it was obvious within about ninety seconds of seeing it: close the laptop and the website is gone. The files are still sitting there and nobody can reach them, because the only machine holding them has stopped answering.

Hashbase was the patch. Paul Frazee announced it on 6 July 2017 as a fungible hosting service for the peer-to-peer web, and the description underneath the marketing word was literal. It was a peer in the cloud that promised to host your content even when your device was turned off. You handed it a Dat URL, it started syncing, and from then on there was always at least one machine seeding your archive. It also mirrored the whole thing over HTTPS, because that is still how most people get at a web page, and it gave you readable shortnames in place of the hash, so Frazee's own site lived at dat://pfrazee.hashbase.io.

The word fungible was load-bearing and the launch post explained why. There was no export flow, because there was nothing to export. Your archive was already a self-contained thing with its own cryptographic address, so leaving Hashbase meant closing the account and handing the same URL to a different provider. The code was MIT licensed and on GitHub from day one, so you could also just run it yourself. A hosting company that worked hard to make itself replaceable is an unusual artifact and it was entirely sincere.

Free got you 100 MB. Seven dollars a month got you 10 GB, plus a stored backup of the archive's entire history log. Frazee was direct about where the money went: subscribing to Hashbase funded the development of Beaker, and they had picked a service over a Kickstarter because they wanted supporters to receive something for the money. Their team of two incorporated as Blue Link Labs around the same post.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the bill ~

Seven dollars a month in 2017 was not a lot of money in the market Blue Link Labs was selling into, and it was a different proposition outside it. I had come up through the free hosting era in Turkey, where the deal was that somebody else paid for the machine and you tolerated whatever they put on the page in exchange. The idea of a monthly card charge in dollars for storage, on a network where almost nobody you knew could reach your address anyway, was a hard sell at any price. That is not a complaint about Hashbase. It is the shape of the market it was selling into.

The deeper trouble was that the pitch argued against itself. Dat's whole case was that hosting should be cheap and shared because the audience carries the bandwidth. Hashbase's case was that this does not work unless somebody keeps a machine on, and you should pay them to do it. Both statements were true at the same time, and the subscription page was where a visitor met them both.

~ the postmortem ~

The notice appeared on the site some time in early 2022, in the same window that Frazee announced Beaker's closure. It was four sentences and signed with a first name. They had sadly decided it was time to shut down Hashbase. The team was moving on to new projects and no longer had the resources to keep the service running. Then a thank you for the years of support, and a dash before the word Paul.

For months afterward the site stayed up with the banner across the top and the sign-up button removed, which is a specific kind of in-between. The last working capture is from 31 July 2022. By 10 October the address was returning a 502, and on 14 October the GitHub repository was archived by its owner and went read-only. Frazee went to Bluesky, where the architecture puts the servers back in on purpose.

~ what is there now ~

The domain changed hands. Today hashbase.io answers 200 with a WordPress site whose menu offers consulting under headings like Web3 and Infra, and whose homepage has lifted the original copy wholesale: hosting for the peer-to-peer web, keep your files online even when your computer is turned off, the same list of featured apps from 2017. It is the old pitch with the people removed, which is a reasonably precise description of what happened to that whole movement.

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