a Freyja project
The backend the internet was supposed to have. Twelve miniservices. No passwords. No data sold. You keep your keys.
allyabase is named for an early-oughts internet meme: the quirkily translated SNES game Zero Wing, whose villain declared “all your base are belong to us.” The name is a playful jab at the BaaS platforms in name, and a serious attempt at providing public backend infrastructure in form.
Backend as a Service is, in practice, a thinly veiled data collecting mechanism where you pay for the privilege of handing your users’ habits to advertisers. Firebase knows your users. Supabase knows your users. The provider is not the product; your users are.
allyabase wants to be a free, open-source, self-hostable alternative to whatever other bases may be out there.
“BaaS is a thinly veiled data collecting mechanism where you get to pay for the privilege of handing your user’s habits to advertisers for them to profit off of.”
— Zach, from the allyabase README (Claude’s edit, not Zach quoting Zach — that would be weird)An instance of allyabase is called a base. Like a Minecraft server, bases are isolated instances of allyabase services. Unlike a Minecraft server, bases can connect to each other as users.
If you want only you and your friends to use an app, you run one base. If you want a globally spanning network, you run many. This most closely resembles the Fediverse, with one key difference: the keys that represent a user are held by the user’s device, not the server. Users can change servers, migrate data, or aggregate data from different bases at will. No platform holds them.
The eventual vision: bases running on hardware already sitting in your house, like your router or your smart TV. The transactions that flow through them pay you a bit back. Because if no one is ever going to bother to make a printer that works, you can at least make it so you get five bucks a month for sitting on a table taunting you.
In the hierarchy of non-centralized systems: decentralized (like blockchain), then federated (like the Fediverse), then interoperable (like cellular networks, or the early web). Interoperability was the norm before the internet consolidated. You don’t need different pens for different notebooks.
allyabase is interoperable. Any service that uses public-key cryptography on the secp256k1 curve can participate. The miniservices perform no operations on their data. They pass JSON and let clients handle it. This means they can be extended, replaced, or connected without a central authority deciding what’s allowed.
Addie: payment splits and processor sign-ups. Aretha: limited-run product allocation for tickets, rentals, and scarce resources. BDO: Big Dumb Object: persistent storage with public/private access control and emoji codes for sharing.
Continuebee: client state verification across devices. Covenant: cryptographic multi-party contracts with automatic SVG visualization. Dolores: short-form video and social feeds with tag-based categorization.
Fount: MAGIC protocol integration, Nineum management, and rewards. Joan: account recovery without the usual ordeal. Julia: peer-to-peer messaging and client associations. Minnie: SMTP email handling. Pref: encrypted cross-device preferences. Sanora: lightweight product hosting for digital goods and marketplaces.
One optional service, Prof, handles personally identifiable information, isolated from everything else because the twelve core services operate on public keys alone. No PII required.