Staltz, The Decentralized Web

In 2017 Andre Staltz, also known as Open Source Hacker, wrote two very important articles about the nature of the internet and where it was going. The first was The Web began dying in 2014, here’s how, which was followed by A plan to rescue the Web from the Internet. This short talk summarises the contents of those two papers, and particularly shows how some of the ideas discussed in the second paper work in practice.

Andre’s thesis in the first paper is that two companies: Google and Facebook now have such a large percentage of internet traffic, around 70%, and they are actively working to keep people in their walled gardens. The impact this has on the rest of the net means that the web has changed completely from its original purpose.

In the second paper he lays out various initiatives and technologies, like a peer-to-peer protocol Secure Scuttlebutt, mesh networks, IPFS and DAT that help circumvent the almost total control these companies have on the web, and to reinvent it from the bottom up.

As still nearly 4 billion people are not served by the internet at present, the idea would be to provide these technologies to these people, as an alternative to the present state of affairs. If any of this interests you, then I suggest you take the time and read his papers, which are full of insight and good ideas.