manifesto
by leandro barbosa
i write this at a moment when commercial video platforms have learned that silencing a creator is cheaper than defending them. aevia exists because that arithmetic needs to be inverted.
the protocol separates two things the internet has learned to conflate. persistence is the guarantee that your video continues to exist. distribution is the decision to push it to the public. aevia anchors the first on the blockchain and regulates the second under transparent governance. one must not imply the other.
“persistence does not imply distribution.”
creators whose work is taken down by opaque decisions, voices that lose reach without warning, outlets and ministries that depend on cdns that can rewrite the rules overnight — all of them need a layer that does not depend on the capricious tolerance of a single provider. aevia is that layer. not out of idealism, but by architecture.
manifests signed on base l2. content addressed by cid. fee-for-service compensation in cusdc for the replication provider nodes perform. when a commercial cdn decides to pull you down, your copies remain where they always were, reachable by the same cid your audience already knows.
aevia is neutral at the infrastructure layer: any canonically signed content can persist on ipfs and be anchored on base l2. users are the publishers of their own manifests — aevia does not assume responsibility for the substance of that content. the editorial layer — ranking, feed, persistence pool subsidy — is what has a public criterion, stated in the aup.
the difference between an opaque platform and a transparent protocol is this: a protocol publishes its normative rules in readable rfcs, exposes the weights of the risk score, and appoints a council with auditable votes. aevia moderates distribution, not content; what exists on raw ipfs is not our decision. what we subsidize, is.
persistence, for us, is an act of care. we start small, with creators whose work does not fit inside the honest policies of commercial platforms. we will continue. slowly, auditably, without hype. if you read this far, you are already part of this.