A **Federated Pinning Service** is not a company — it is a co-operative of HomeLabs. Each member runs their own local pinning machine (a Raspberry Pi and a drive) *and* lends their own personal free-tier accounts on the public pinning services. An IPFS Cluster binds them into one pinset. The network's total storage is the sum of everyone's drives and everyone's free tiers, and every HomeLab that joins makes it bigger. Part of Anarchive Hosting.
## What a HomeLab Brings
- **Personal free tiers** — the member's *own* accounts on any public pinning service whose **free tier still allows pin-by-CID**. In 2026 that is, in practice, **Filebase alone** (5 GB): Pinata paywalls pin-by-CID, and 4EVERLAND gates it behind on-chain identity registration. The free tiers are a bonus, not the foundation — which is exactly why the foundation is the members' own nodes.
Nobody buys anything. The member already owns the Pi; the free tiers are free. And because commercial free tiers erode — paywalls, wallet gates, shrinking quotas — the **members' own drives are the durable layer**, not the services. The Cluster makes those drives add up.
## The Cluster That Binds Them
The members run one IPFS Cluster. Trusted peers hold write access to the pinset; everyone else joins as a **follower** (`ipfs-cluster-follow`) that replicates it. The cluster is gated by a shared **secret**, passed between members out-of-band — the secret is what makes the cluster *the working group*, not the open internet. The Anarchive seed peer runs on the Homebase 
Pi5.
The cluster's `replication_factor` is the dial. Set to −1, every pin lands on every node — maximum redundancy. Set to a number N, the cluster's allocator spreads each pin across N nodes — trading redundancy for capacity. Retrieval is unaffected either way: content addressing means any node or gateway holding the CID can serve it.
## The Capacity Math
Let each HomeLab bring a drive of size **D** and free tiers totalling **F** (about 6+ GB across Filebase, Pinata and 4EVERLAND). For **H** HomeLabs at replication factor **R**: - raw pool = **H × (D + F)** - effective capacity = **H × (D + F) ÷ R** A working group of 42, each with a 1 TB drive, at triple replication: about **14 TB of effective, triple-redundant storage — for nothing**. Add a member and the pool grows by their drive and their free tiers at once. The free tiers alone — 42 × ~6 GB — are a quarter-terabyte of commercial-grade pinning nobody pays for.
## The Four Modes
Each file is pinned under one of four modes — the per-file policy, set on the pinning machine and documented on Anarchive Pinning :
- **local** — Homebase only; nothing leaves the member's machine. Private wiki content.
- **p2p** — the group cluster; replicated across the federation, no commercial service. For the Mice and the working group of 42.
- **public** — one public service, chosen by `hash(CID) % N` so the file's home is recomputable.
- **redundant** — Homebase plus every public service. Reliability first.
## How to Join
A new HomeLab needs three things running, none of them paid: 1. **Kubo** — an IPFS node with a drive (see install-ipfs and IPFS Pinning). 2. **`ipfs-cluster-follow`** — join the Anarchive cluster with the shared secret, obtained from the group out-of-band. 3. **Your own free tiers** — register your personal Filebase / Pinata / 4EVERLAND tokens on your node so the federation can place public pins through your accounts too.
## Trust
The secret-shared cluster *is* the trust boundary: only members hold the secret, so only members' nodes replicate the pinset. This is the storage layer of the working group of 42 — a commons whose members vouch for each other by sharing capacity. Content addressing keeps *reading* open to anyone with a CID; *hosting* stays a deliberate act of the group. The bigger the group, the more durable everyone's archive, and no single member's outage or exit takes anything down.
## Links
- IPFS Cluster — pinset orchestration across nodes
- Collaborative clusters — the follower model
- IPFS Pinning Service API — what the free tiers speak
# Assets
federated-pinning-service
## See
- Anarchive Hosting and One Big Auction Box — the hosting plan and the public-by-design peer
- IPFS Cluster, install-ipfs and Filecoin — this site's earlier decentralised-storage research
- Anarchive Pinning and Homebase — the ring and the pin of last resort (media.anarchive.earth)