Why we're doing all this and where it's leading by Holmes Wilson
Presented by Holmes Wilson
All of us are here because we're drawn towards the idea of a decentralized web. But is there a unifying framework for what "decentralized web" means? And, if all our projects succeed, is there a history that can help predict what changes our successes will bring to the world?
This talk will look at what was won when open source software enabled the Web 2.0 boom, where it failed and why, and compare that to the current moment. As someone building the Dweb (my project is a p2p Slack, Quiet) I care a lot where it's headed. I bet you do too, so let's model it!
Holmes Wilson is an Internet freedom activist whose work mixes mass mobilization and software tools. He is a co-founder and board member of Fight for the Future, the activism organization that was instrumental in defeating the infamous US site-blocking laws SOPA/PIPA, fighting for net neutrality rules in the US and Europe, opposing law enforcement crypto backdoors, and more recently challenging the use of face recognition tech by US law enforcement and products like Amazon Ring. He also previously co-founded Miro, a free software video player based on Bittorrent and RSS, and was a campaign manager at the Free Software Foundation. He’s currently building Quiet, a local-first, peer-to-peer team chat app. Quiet differs from Slack, Discord, Matrix, and Signal in that it does not require that users trust a third party server or run their own. Instead, data syncs directly between clients over the Tor network, with no server required.