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What is Kevalin?
Note: Kevalin is still very early in development. Some of the below represents plans for future development, and not the current state of the project.
For a long time, there have been problems with the World Wide Web relating to availability. In the late 90s, a website becoming suddenly popular might overload the server hosting it. This used to be called the ['Slashdot effect'][1], and amounts to a distributed denial-of-service attack. This problem has been largely eliminated for larger sites thanks to cloud computing with the potential to scale resources on demand, but the fact remains that the cost of providing the popular content falls on the publisher. Without a means of passing the costs on to the visitor, they often use advertising or subscriptions, even if the content itself is free (public domain or Creative Commons) or crowdsourced.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slashdot_effect
The effect of the cost and administrative burden of operating a reliable web server or scaled web hosting service means that individual people with something they'd like to share online end up relying on centralised services. The early blogging platforms like Blogger and LiveJournal (both founded in 1999) were pioneers in this space, and MySpace (2003) and Facebook (2004) were the socially gamified followups. Later services tried to strip away the distractions, such as Twitter (2006), and more recently Medium (2012) has almost returned full circle to a blog-style publishing platform, but with enhanced social features. And also, a subscription model to pay for it.
Sign your work
Content on the web is generally accessible at a known address on a centralised server, such as facebook.com. This is really convenient: if I want to publish a document I can give you its address and you can be sure you're reading the document I wrote.
Unfortunately, it also means that you need to trust the operator of the server to look after that data. Usually, in order for the web service to operate smoothly, the data is not encrypted on the server. Even if only certain users are allowed to view your posts, if the server is hacked or the operator looks at the files, the data is available to people you didn't intend.
Additionally, if someone is able to access those files on the server, they may also be able to change them, attributing posts to you that you didn't author.
Kevalin treats posts as portable documents which could reside anywhere (on a USB stick, in your Dropbox account, or on a traditional website) which are digitally signed and encrypted by the author so that only the intended audience may view the content, and the authenticity of the document can be verified.
This means that there's no longer a server to trust, and your posts can be distributed by any medium securely.
Where is the data?
Since Kevalin doesn't tie data to a centralised server, where is it stored instead?
First of all, you own your own data. A copy of all the posts you publish is stored in your local browser cache. Since this is not really the best long-term storage, you can optionally choose to back them up to a cloud storage provider such as Dropbox, or export them to a file.
Anyone who subscribes to your published content participates in ensuring that it is available to other subscribers. The more followers you have, the more copies of your content will be distributed around the network.
Additionally, anyone who follows a link to your post will have a copy of it which they will make available to other users for a short period afterwards.
Finally, there will eventually be services which aggregate content on your behalf. You could either run one of these yourself as a 'node' in the Kevalin network, or rent space from someone else. These nodes would ensure that your content is always available on the network for your followers, and also collect the content you're interested in for faster browsing.