docs.lumeweb.com/docs/lume.md

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Lume

Since we defined the limitations of Web2 and building blocks of Web3, let's take a look at what Lume is and where it fits in the grander scale.

How did it start

Lume started (before we even decided it was a project or the name) while we were trying to create a web3 cloud drive on Nextcloud based on Skynet. We realized that we were going down the wrong path and needed to solve accessing content before doing anything with the content itself.

Skynet in the process had a very rough year, as since 2020, Skynet tried to solve distribution with network of Skynet Portals, but experienced number of obstacles from all levels of internet infrastructure (see Limitations of Web2) and eventually was shut down.

Sia in the background was trying to support both innovating and Skynets efforts, and things came to a head with Skynet going bankrupt.

In that journey, Lume has pivoted at-least 1 time to meet its goals, and has ended up having to build many building blocks out of necessity, and a few that may go unused 🙃.

Sia has since started rebuilding with new software, and Lume has been building on top.

Sia is the network of the worlds data, and Handshake replaces ICANN while collaborating with the web3 ecosystem. We have discussed Sia a lot so far, but let it also be known the Handshake tribe has had its own share of drama too, and Lume is actively involved in both.

So the rabbit hole of Web3 DNS is where we started as the origin of Lume, which means the world or light in Romanian. It was our intention from the beginning to contribute to the solution of the web's censorship issues and becoming a bridge (or gateway) to the Web3.

What is Lume? Simple version, please!

What is Lume? This is something we have often asked ourselves to explain it 😅.

Lume can be broken down into a few major focuses:

• Lume is a P2P network that uses public keys instead of torrent hashes to access peers and content.
  • Like a BitTorrent, but ready for Web3. You can also see it to be a bit like IPFS which uses Libp2p, but more light weight.
    • The goal here is to create a bridge P2P network to service all of Web3.
    • It's NOT a blockchain. You don't need one since anyone can provide services with RPC or their own custom protocol, and anyone can query them.
• Lume is a storage portal (think L2 in blockchain terms).
  • It builds on Sia and stores your private data, and eventually public. In other words think of it like a paid IPFS service, but its not IPFS.
• Lume is the end user gateway.
  • It is how you will interface with all content networks, blockchains, or other nets in the future. This could be a browser extension, web browser itself or anything in-between.

Ok, I get it. Now how it works under the hood?

It's a bridge, it's a gateway

Lume can be seen as a middleware system where you can plug anything in and access it over the relay network. This is done with a help of Hypercore/Dat (see https://docs.holepunch.to which is born from https://dat-ecosystem.org) that allows it to proxy (relay) access to other networks anonymously, and to provide some DNS services. It is also end-to-end encrypted (based on https://noiseprotocol.org).

In the future, Lume will also support WebRTC to act as a signal network and connect browser to browser.

It's a storage network and access portal

Lume's portal is powered by Sia (https://sia.tech), and is where all your private data gets stored. It is encrypted before uploading, and it is a paid storage you are accessing through a portal and your web account. The portal can also store public data, for example social app, by just not encrypting. If you paid attention, you remember that Sia is private storage, so how is this possible? It's about the renter (in this case Lume), since you can decide to upload data that do not use encryption and then use them as privately owned (and paid) public data.

The portal is also responsible for hosting all browser code for the end user.

Kernel

Next is the frontend of everything. The browser tech of Lume can be referred to as as the kernel and kernel modules, like with Linux. The frontend will load an iframe which loads a bootloader from a .js file which then will trigger a login state if a key is set. It will download the kernel from a community list of portals and once setup, the client app can then run anything they like. All modules operate as web workers inside the iframe.

Supported Content Networks

This is the basis of how you can run light clients, SPV nodes, DNS resolvers, content networks and much, much more. It is all based on CID's (Content Identifiers) which use the blake3 hash algo and come from S5 Network (https://docs.sfive.net/concepts/content-addressed-data.html).

With blake3 we can also support real time verified streaming, which means files get verified based on their hash as you download so everything is fully trustless. See https://github.com/n0-computer/abao.

Path forward

This browser tech can take many forms and Lume will continue evolving to be more advanced over time with its browsing abilities and more importantly, become easy and comfortable to use. That's its biggest problem today and also a reason we already started planning an extension for the most popular browser, Chrome. The end goal is a browser fork, but right now we need to get the foundations right.

So Lume is where all roads meet. It is the bridge, hub, gateway, end user access. It is what allows you to discover Web3 services in the same way you discover seeders with BitTorrent. It is what gives you private storage paired with other Sia ecosystem applications, like from S5.

Lume wants to solve the biggest issues we have left, data ownership, actual decentralization and accessibility.