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<h2>About</h2>
<p>Somewhere right now, a grandmother's photo album is dissolving in a flooded
basement. A soldier's letters home exist only on a shuttered email service. A
child's first words, recorded on a phone, will vanish when the cloud
subscription lapses.</p>
<p>We are the first generation in history that produces more memories than any
civilization before us — and loses them faster than any civilization before us.</p>
<h2 id="the-problem-no-one-talks-about">The Problem No One Talks About</h2>
<p>Every platform you trust with your memories is temporary. Every company that
promises "forever" is one quarterly report away from pivoting, selling, or
shutting down. Every proprietary format is a ticking clock.</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Google Photos, iCloud, OneDrive</strong> — your memories live on someone else's
server, under someone else's terms of service, behind someone else's paywall</li>
<li><strong>Social media</strong> — your life story is scattered across platforms that treat
your memories as advertising inventory</li>
<li><strong>Hard drives and USB sticks</strong> — they fail silently, with no warning and no
backup</li>
<li><strong>DVDs and CDs</strong> — already unreadable for most people</li>
</ul>
<p>The pattern is always the same: a format becomes popular, a company makes it
easy, people pour their lives into it, and then it disappears. GeoCities. Vine.
MySpace. Google+. The list grows every year.</p>
<p>This is not a technology problem. It is a design problem. We keep building
systems where memory preservation is a side effect of someone's business model,
not the purpose.</p>
<h2 id="what-tesseras-does-differently">What Tesseras Does Differently</h2>
<p>Tesseras starts from a radical premise: <strong>your memories belong to you, and they
should outlast every company, platform, and format that exists today.</strong></p>
<p>A tessera is a self-contained time capsule — photos, audio, video, and text —
packaged in a format designed to be understood centuries from now, without any
special software.</p>
<h3 id="no-servers-no-subscriptions-no-company">No Servers. No Subscriptions. No Company.</h3>
<p>Tesseras is a peer-to-peer network built on mutual aid. You store fragments of
other people's memories, and they store yours. No tokens, no blockchain, no
monthly fees. The incentive is simple and human: I help preserve your story, you
help preserve mine.</p>
<h3 id="survives-anything">Survives Anything</h3>
<p>Your tessera is protected by erasure coding — the same mathematics that keeps
deep-space probes talking to Earth. Your data is split into redundant fragments
and distributed across the network. Nodes can go offline, hard drives can fail,
entire regions can lose connectivity — and your memories survive.</p>
<h3 id="self-describing-format">Self-Describing Format</h3>
<p>Every tessera carries within itself the instructions to be decoded. In plain
text. In multiple languages. Even if every copy of the Tesseras software
disappeared tomorrow, anyone with a basic understanding of computing could read
your tessera. It is a file format designed for archaeologists, not just
programmers.</p>
<h3 id="post-quantum-cryptography">Post-Quantum Cryptography</h3>
<p>Tesseras uses dual signatures — classical Ed25519 and post-quantum ML-DSA — so
that the authenticity of your memories can be verified even after quantum
computers render today's cryptography obsolete. We protect the future, today.</p>
<h3 id="built-for-the-long-arc">Built for the Long Arc</h3>
<p>Every decision in Tesseras is made with centuries in mind:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Simplest media formats</strong> — JPEG for photos, WAV for audio, WebM for video,
plain text for writing. Not because they're the best, but because they'll be
readable the longest.</li>
<li><strong>No encryption by default</strong> — availability over secrecy. A memory that can't
be decrypted is a memory that's lost. Private memories can be encrypted, but
the default is survival.</li>
<li><strong>No dependency on the internet</strong> — tesseras can be stored on USB drives,
optical media, Raspberry Pis on a shelf, even low-power IoT devices. Any copy
is a valid copy.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="the-human-need">The Human Need</h2>
<p>Humans have always preserved memories. Cave paintings in Lascaux. Clay tablets
in Mesopotamia. Letters folded into books. Photo albums passed from parent to
child.</p>
<p>The desire to be remembered — to leave proof that we were here, that we loved,
that we lived — is among the deepest human impulses. Every culture, in every
era, has found ways to inscribe its existence into something more durable than a
single lifetime.</p>
<p>The digital age promised to make this easier. Instead, it made it fragile. We
traded durability for convenience, and the cost is measured in lost childhoods,
forgotten faces, and stories that no one will ever hear.</p>
<p>Tesseras is an attempt to restore the ancient contract: <strong>what you choose to
remember should endure.</strong></p>
<h2 id="why-tesseras">Why "Tesseras"?</h2>
<p>A <em>tessera</em> (plural <em>tesserae</em>) is a small piece of stone, glass, or ceramic
used to compose a mosaic. The word comes from Latin, borrowed from the Greek
<em>τέσσερα</em> — the tiny squares that, piece by piece, built the grand mosaics of
Rome, Pompeii, and Byzantium.</p>
<p>Some of those mosaics are still intact after two thousand years.</p>
<p>The metaphor is the project: each tessera in our network is a small,
self-contained fragment — individually simple, individually durable. But
together, they compose something larger: a mosaic of human memory, distributed
across thousands of nodes, resilient enough to outlast any single point of
failure.</p>
<p>Just as ancient tesserae needed no manual to be understood — a shard of colored
stone speaks for itself — each digital tessera carries within it everything
needed to be read, in plain formats, in plain language.</p>
<p>The name is also a reminder of scale. A mosaic is not made in a day. It is
assembled piece by piece, with patience, by many hands. That is how we intend to
build a network that lasts.</p>
<h2 id="open-source-open-protocol-open-future">Open Source, Open Protocol, Open Future</h2>
<p>Tesseras is free software under the ISC license. The protocol is open. The
format is documented. Anyone can run a node, build a client, or fork the entire
project.</p>
<p>There is no venture capital behind Tesseras. No growth metrics to hit. No exit
strategy. Just a simple conviction: the technology to preserve human memory
should not be owned by anyone.</p>
<h2 id="current-status">Current Status</h2>
<p>Tesseras is in Phase 4 — Resilience and Scale. The core format, cryptographic
foundations, peer-to-peer network, active replication with erasure coding,
GraphQL API, and Flutter app are built. We are now working on Shamir's Secret
Sharing for heir key recovery, advanced NAT traversal, and performance tuning.</p>
<p>This is a long-term project. We measure progress in decades, not quarters.</p>
<h2 id="join-us">Join Us</h2>
<p>If you believe that human memory is worth preserving — not as a product, not as
a service, but as a fundamental right — we'd love your help.</p>
<ul>
<li>Read the <a href="/faq/">FAQ</a> to learn more</li>
<li>Join the <a href="/subscriptions/">mailing lists</a> for updates</li>
<li>Browse the <a rel="external" href="https://git.sr.ht/~ijanc/tesseras">source code</a></li>
<li><a href="/contact/">Contact us</a> directly</li>
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