Alex
I joined the Arweave community around two years ago, doing comms for the Alex Archive and Bazar Marketplace. This was part-time while I was in grad school, planning to pursue a career in academia. Before that time, I had a mostly negative view of crypto. It felt like vaporware at best, outright fraud at worst.
That changed when I discovered the permaweb.
Arweave has product-market fit. It’s coming up on its 7-year anniversary, longer than the lifespan of most hard drives, which typically last 3 to 5 years. Data storage isn’t flashy, but Arweave keeps growing year after year. Dare I say it’s reaching Lindy status?
Now, the ecosystem is evolving beyond storage. AO, Arweave’s new compute layer, takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of trying to scale shared state execution like most blockchains, AO is built on message-passing between processes, similar to how the internet operates through stateless, addressable communication. This makes AO scalable by design, not by compromise.
I’m not a deeply technical person. I write more than I code. To keep up with the ecosystem, I started using Obsidian as a notetaking tool and logged everything I found useful: X threads, blog posts, interview notes, and insights from conversations with the many gigabrained developers I’ve met.
This personal repo became my go-to source for tracking the fast-paced evolution of the ecosystem. As the AO mainnet approached, it became increasingly difficult to follow the latest updates. Community questions piled up. Unlike a traditional testnet-to-mainnet launch, the transition from legacynet to mainnet is a complex and continuous process.
Beyond AO’s rollout, reliable information is still hard to come by for both developers and users.
One reason is the ecosystem is successfully decentralized. No single org controls the narrative. Each team builds freely, which leads to different visions and development paths. That is the promise of open protocols.
Another reason is that the AO team ships new features weekly, pushing the boundaries of what decentralized compute can do. But with that speed, docs fall behind. Developers feel left in the dark. Users feel abandoned when their favorite apps go quiet, while builders are still catching up to AO’s latest changes.
On the bright side, AO has a founder focused on getting the architecture right from the start. Major changes are hard to retrofit into a mature protocol. Just look at the ongoing challenges with scaling Ethereum.
Objective This PR introduces preview-stage compatibility with GETing and POSTing to AO legacynet schedulers using the ~scheduler@1.0 device. Additionally, the ~push@1.0 device has been upgraded to ...
That’s what led me to start the Permaweb Journal. With a background in writing and proximity to the devs building this new web, I saw an opportunity to create a repository of permaweb-native content. This content is meant to help newcomers, whether devs or end users, and to keep the ecosystem informed.
Obsidian is still my home base, which made the Quartz static-site generator an easy choice. It integrates with Obsidian, supports markdown, and lets me link between pages. This setup creates the foundation for a living knowledge network.
There’s also a deeper motivation. AI is rapidly reshaping how we search. Tools like Perplexity, ChatGPT and even Google Chrome now surface LLM-generated summaries. But LLMs need data. Most of the permaweb’s discussion happens in silos like X, Telegram, and Discord. Written resources are often outdated, disjointed, or not indexable.
A core goal of Permaweb Journal is to become the most indexable content hub on the permaweb. It will be optimized for search engines, retrievable by LLMs, and representative of what is actually happening on our corner of the web.
Permaweb Journal isn’t the first publication to emerge in this ecosystem. Sustaining a media project in crypto is hard, especially when attention spans are short. But by focusing on timeless analysis and indexable insights, I believe the Journal can serve a unique and lasting role in the ecosystem.
Looking forward to expanding this project and building with others.
Follow Permaweb Journal on X to get the latest news and updates about Arweave and AO.
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