Decentralized Web Movement
= also called the 'DWeb movement'.
Discussion
By Kaitlyn Tiffany:
"In a recent webinar series, the Internet Archive defined the decentralized-web movement as an effort to break apart “all the layers” of the current online experience. It’s helpful to think about this idea in terms of what it opposes: Meta, for example, centralizes messaging, media sharing, data collection, and much else, so users are subject to its content-moderation policies and can’t help but submit their information to its sprawling marketing apparatus. Amazon owns so much of the infrastructure that the internet runs on that you could hardly function without it.
The DWeb movement is interested in subverting this status quo through tools that would give individuals greater control over their online identities and information. “I’m trying to channel the confusion that you’re looking at me with right now,” Kahle told me, when I asked him to explain it. “How do I help other people understand what the heck is going on here?”
Some things would be really different for the average web user—she might no longer rely on Facebook or Google to verify her identity when logging in to various sites or be followed around by advertisements that know all about her. Other changes would ideally be unnoticeable to her. For instance, a decentralized version of The Atlantic’s website might look the same, but the underlying machinery would be quite different—it might be hosted on any number of independent servers owned by users around the world, rather than through a major provider controlled by a big tech company.
Web3, according to the Internet Archive’s series, has a narrower technical definition: It’s “the ‘blockchain-ification’ of the web, using blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies to verify transactions, pay for services, and certify content such as NFTs.”
The two communities—or perspectives, or movements—overlap, and the boundaries are fuzzy. Filecoin, a decentralized storage project, is funded and funds other decentralized projects with a fortune raised through an initial coin offering, or ICO (the crypto equivalent of an IPO); the Ethereum Foundation, a nonprofit established to support projects related to the titular blockchain, is a sponsor of the Internet Archive’s annual DWeb camp; and Twitter is experimenting with crypto and working on a new decentralized social-network protocol simultaneously.
At the conference, speakers used “Web3” interchangeably with “decentralized web.” They come up in the same breath because crypto is fundamentally decentralized itself, and because their proponents have a shared cause. “There’s an underlying agreement between Web3- and DWeb-aligned people that they care about user self-determination,” Mai Ishikawa Sutton, a fellow at the Commons Network and one of the organizers of the past two DWeb camps, told me. “They care about being able to control your data, at some level having information that is transparent, that the system is transparent, and that it’s not about having one entity controlling everything, in theory.”
Sutton was part of a group that published a set of “organizing principles” for the DWeb movement in 2021—a process that took several years. By dint of having principles at all, DWeb became a smaller tent than Web3. People who disagree on a lot of things can agree on a technical system, Nathan Schneider, a media-studies professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and a frequent writer on collectivism and tech, told me. “DWeb asks more,” he said, and dwells on two key questions: “What do we actually want socially, and how do we center those values in our technical designs, so the technical becomes a means to an end, rather than an end in itself?”
This ethos is expanded on in the new digital magazine Compost, edited by Sutton. Compost is also an example of the decentralized web in practice; you can access it on your regular browser, Google Chrome or whatever you use, and you can access it via Hypercore or IPFS, peer-to-peer protocols you probably have not heard of. Those protocols offer advantages: If you like what you read, you can download the magazine in its entirety, ensuring that you can read it later in a decentralized browser like Brave or Agregore without being connected to the internet. By making this copy, you can also become a node in the decentralized network, so that when someone else asks to see the magazine, your computer may be the one that serves it. As long as individuals keep sharing the content, it remains accessible—not so with a PDF hosted on a company’s web server.
This technology wouldn’t fall under some definitions of Web3, because it doesn’t use a blockchain. In fact, the underlying mechanics have been around for a long time—it’s the same basic idea that made Napster work in 1999, or BitTorrent in 2001. And there are other elements of the DWeb that definitely wouldn’t be called Web3, like community-owned mesh networks, which serve as last-mile infrastructure for internet service or help groups maintain their own private intranets without relying on a service provider like Verizon.
These decentralized technologies, it could be said, are focused on empowering individuals; “pump and dump” cryptocurrencies and NFT projects, perhaps less so. Sutton has been saddened by the conflation of the two ideas. “When I say I’m working on a crypto project or I’m working on the decentralized web, it sounds like I’m part of this movement to build a series of exploitative pyramid schemes,” they told me.
This was the discrepancy that motivated my original curiosity about DWeb and Web3 as entwined but separable strands. How must it feel to start something idealistically, in obscurity, and then watch it become a global phenomenon for reasons that you would never have chosen? But this question turned out to be more complicated than I thought. Some rejected the question itself. Weyl, for one, acknowledged that the projects and products that got the most attention over the past two years were “horrible, hyper-capitalistic, financially exploitative idiocy,” but also argued that all of the other DWeb stuff I was talking about “wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the attention they’ve gotten, including your interest, if the whole Web3 thing hadn’t happened.” The moral distinctions I was buying into were, at some level, petty tribalism, he said. DWeb may have existed first, but “as a practical matter they’re riding on the coattails of Web3.”