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How the Media Industry is Embracing Decentralized Storage
The Upload V57
As culture and media become increasingly digital, they also become more fragile. Research from the ‘Not Your Parents' Web project revealed a startling reality: the median lifespan of a web page is just 2.3 years. A Pew Research Center analysis shows that 38% of web pages from 2013 are no longer accessible.
Now, we’re witnessing digital history being erased. Entire archives are being lost. Links that once led to vital information now return 404 errors. The web, which promised to democratize information storage, is proving more fragile than the paper records it was meant to replace.
Few sectors are more vulnerable to digital decay than journalism and media. Traditional news archives, often stored on centralized servers, remain susceptible to corporate decisions, cyberattacks, policy changes, or technical failures that can erase decades of reporting in an instant. At the same time, misinformation is proliferating, blurring the lines between fact and fiction.
Technologies like Filecoin and IPFS offer a fundamentally different approach to digital preservation, providing resilient, tamper-resistant storage that ensures critical stories, investigations, and archives remain accessible and verifiable for the long term. For journalism, this represents two crucial advantages:
Resilience: Instead of storing data in a single location, Filecoin distributes content across multiple nodes worldwide. This means there is no single point of failure, and critical journalism remains accessible even if original publishers go offline.
Verifiable integrity: IPFS uses content addressing to create a cryptographic fingerprint of stored data. This generates tamper-proof, transparent records of data provenance, providing certainty that content remains unchanged over time.
Early adopters in journalism are already using Filecoin to protect their work and help people trust what they see online:
 | Empowering Grassroots Journalism: Fasila will support more than 20 journalists in preserving critical stories — along with associated digital records — on the Filecoin network and opening access through IPFS, ensuring these narratives are not lost to censorship, technological failure, or time. |
 | Ensuring Media Redundancy: FF recently partnered with The Defiant to create redundant, tamper-resistant backups of its reporting, ensuring continued access for the long term. |
 | Fighting Link Rot and Maintaining Document Access: MuckRock integrated IPFS and Filecoin into DocumentCloud, a platform hosting over 5.5 million verified documents. More than 1.3 million files have been preserved on Filecoin –– ensuring key public records remain accessible and resilient. |
 | Resilience for Sensitive Archives: Evidence of human rights offenses and war crimes are some of our world’s most vulnerable digital archives. Starling Lab uses Filecoin and other DWeb protocols to capture, store, and verify sensitive records. |
 | Combating Misinformation: Numbers Protocol is using Filecoin to support projects like VoteTW 2024, a project that allowed voters to verify the origin and integrity of images and videos during Taiwan’s elections. |
 | Supporting Citizen Journalists: Guardian Project, in collaboration with Okthanks and WITNESS, developed ProofMode — a mobile tool that captures and cryptographically verifies photos and videos, empowering journalists and other content creators to capture verifiable video directly from their smartphones. |
 | Decentralized Distribution Platforms: Distributed Press is building beginner-friendly, open source publishing tools giving creators a decentralized, no-code alternative to centralized platforms — empowering writers to publish freely and retain control of their work. |
A healthier media ecosystem isn’t just a technology challenge — it’s a societal one. These stories are how we understand our world and remember what matters, and decentralized infrastructure like Filecoin lays the groundwork to support our shared history.
Are you ready to decentralize your data on Filecoin? Connect with an expert.
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Ready to build the future of decentralized storage? Filecoin is going fully onchain. Now is your chance to build with it: the Hack The Sovereign Data Layer with Filecoin challenge part of the PL Genesis Modular Worlds Hackathon is live now!
Learn how to store and retrieve data on Filecoin using the Synapse SDK! Whether you’re building a groundbreaking dApp that requires decentralized file storage, a platform that needs to guarantee data availability, or a service that leverages the unique properties of Filecoin, Synapse SDK is engineered to adapt to your needs.
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In a world where journalists can be de-platformed on a whim, Storacha, a decentralized hot storage network for data at scale leveraging Filecoin and IPFS, created bsky.storage, a step toward Bluesky's vision for users attaining true ownership of data and social identity.
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The Filecoin Plus (Fil+) Round 6 application period is live, offering a prime opportunity for organizations to join the program or for existing allocators to refine their pathways. This round 6 update is your chance to join or strengthen your role in Fil+’s mission to scale decentralized storage. Round 6 submissions are due July 11, 2025.