The group is refining their
schema for decentralized, offline-first systems
Among the Seminar participants, there seems to be emerging a first rough consensus on how a “Base CRDT” could be configured. From concept drawings to presentation slides, our group is sharing their architectural ideas with the wider public, refining the principles, soliciting feedback.
As I helped do the final cleanup
of our homey venue, the post-its left behind data we offer formed a patchwork quilt of key challenges to solve: Pruning, Composability, DAGs, BFTs, Authorship Provenance. These are the “shadow future” on the edge of our DWeb present. But the real impact of our week is undoubtedly human. Can Andreas run P2Panda over David’s Spritely? Should this group be building atop Brendan’s iroh stack? Now that Eric and Santiago share a common vocabulary, is collaboration more likely? Only time will tell. The mission of the DWeb is to “connect people, projects and protocols to build a decentralized web,” but there is a reason we put “people” first.
Seminar organizers Wendy Hanamura
Scott Garrison, Christian Tschudin, Kevin Nguyen, Andreas Dzialocha. Missing: Dmitri Zagidulin
THE WHY: When Brewster asked me to produce the first Decentralized Web Summit in 2016, we featured the “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, and the “Father of the Web” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, pioneers in the brave, new online world we now inhabit. The original 80 people we invited to Builders Day included the next generation of builders of a radical redesign of Web 2.0. Today, nine years later, yet another generation of P2P architects is sketching out the stack they hope others may one day come to use. I believe this week of deeply esoteric conversations has brought us a few steps closer. (Brilliant minds + human connections = potential breakthroughs.)
But why do I commit myself to this vision?
In 2023, I retired from the Internet Archive, and yet here I am camped out in a house with 15 developers. It doesn’t take a seer to imagine our near future: massive amounts of data are erased from the Web; truth fractures; climate change and war create people who are stateless and without official identities; the chasm between the powerful and powerless grows ever wider. These problems are creating demand for new and better tools. Users are looking for alternatives in the marketplace. Our friends at Bluesky could not have predicted Elon Musk’s Twitter take-over, but fortunately, their protocol and app were relatively ready for the moment when millions flocked to them away from X. We need to be ready.