Decentralized Web

We meet the 3rd Saturday of every month, 6-9pm, at Noisebridge.

Introduction

The internet is the physical, interconnected computer network that runs TCP/IP to link devices globally. The web is all the things communicted over the internet. Unfortunately, the web has become increasingly centralized in the era of "Web2", where no one owns their own data, and people, even on the same network, cannot communicate with one another without connecting to some centralized middleman. The goal of the decentralized web (sometimes called Web3, but usually just in reference to blockchain) movement is to build not just censorship resistant technology, but also communities that use those technologies. An awesome tool used by no one is lame.

These meetings will consist of presentations and collaboration. Presentations will be of varying lengths, some by invited technologists to showcase their work, and some by regular attendees to discuss what they are working on and any incremental prgress. Additionally, we will aim to connect people with existing decentralized web projects as well as define and start new projects.

Current projects

Come to our first meeting to propose one! (project ideas below after Meeting Notes)

Meeting Notes

• 2024-01-18

• • LlamaFile

    presented by Justine Tunney

• • Group Income and/or Chelonia

    presented by Greg Slepak

• • Other Presentations?

    Come and talk about what you're working on!

Project Ideas

Come to our meetings to propose more ideas!

Monetization of Free Culture

Capitalism has won out in large part because it has mastered the maintainance of supply chains. It ensures that workers are paid enough to show up the next day (though not necessarily enough to live comfortably). However, capitalism relies on scarcity, so the non-scarse ones and zeros that make up our digital culture has been made artificially scarse by Copyright and Patent Law. To break free from these bonds of artificial scarsity locking up our softwre, hardware, and media which make up our culture, we must discover a way support the supply chains that make the culture we use. The main problems to be solved are:

• Decentralization - The solution must lack centralzide middlemen, and allow an individual to support individual contributers, not just organizations (though supporting organizations is fine).
• Value assignment - There are millions of people that contribute to the technology and media we use and consume. To be a valid solution, it must facilitate some automatic assignment of value to contributions that make up the culture we use. It should be entirely customizeable, but should have sane-enough defaults to permit lazy usage.
• Microtransaction - Though we may eventually replace normal currencies like Bitcoin or USD, prospective beneficiaries must be able turn support into food and rent. Since normal currencies incurr transaction fees, there must be some mechanism by which funders can organize to reduce the number of transactions.

The goal is to support specifically free culture (especially, initially, free software), it would be nice if there is some method for onboarding, so people can dedicate support to nonfree culture on the condition that that culture is freed, for instance by a release under a free license.

Decentralizing Noisebridge

In the interest of dogfooding, we should try to help Noisebridge, or at least this meetup, operate on decentralized technologies.

Make Email Hosting Easy!

SMTP is possibly the most successful decentralized web protocol. The world still largely runs on email. However, the email ecosystem evolved organically with many systems added on top: IMAP, POP3, DMARC, DKIM, SPF, etc. All of these additional systems have increased security, scalability, and usability by the end user, at the expense of ease of initial setup. Though it would not be reasonable to try and "automate" a setup for a general email server, it is possible to do so for a specific email server setup. Some goals of the setup:

• Support sending/recieving from (at least) one email address.
• DNS automatically updates via API calls (ideally supporting dynamic ip addresses).
• Runs on multiple computers for redundancy without manual intervention if one goes down.
• Allow two people to operate (secondarily) as backup email servers for eachother.

Licencing Note

Unlike the rest of this wiki, this page shall remain CC-BY 4.0. NonCommercial licenses are not free.