4 Interesting Distributed Web Projects
This past week I had the privilege of learning about four projects working to connect people via the decentralized web through a DWeb online meetup. The focus of this showcase was to raise awareness of projects that challenge authoritarianism and allow people to self organize in a mutualistic and peer to peer way. These are my notes on each of those projects, in the order they were presented but no particular ranking beyond that.
eQualitie is not a single tool, but a library of tools designed to allow folks to access the internet despite shutdowns. Earlier this year it was used during the June outage in Iran as well as recent outages in Russia. Their tools are used to resist censorship and surveillance by utilizing technologies like P2P sharing and decentralized caching (as in their Ceno web browser) to ensure continued access to information even during a global disconnect or shutdown. Their eQsat delivery system has allowed content to be shared from Ukraine.
IROH is a library focused on building P2P networking that works. It's a three year old open source project that is focused on reliability. It allows developers to connect any two devices on the planet via public key dialing. Designed to run on a wide range of hardware, down to an esp32, this library is only the networking stack and prioritizes collaborating closely with other projects to build application stacks for end users.
Fireaid.info & mutua.nyc are sibling projects; fireaid was born within days of the Los Angeles fires as a means of creating a more accessible version of an already circulating spreadsheet. By the third day, the map of mutual aid was being shared widely with the bulk of it's traffic coming from shares on Instagram. According to creator Johan Michalove, the key insight of this project is that organizing is everything; this effort would not have been possible without organized people communicating with their communities directly. These projects explore how technological intervention can unblock the latent goodwill that is present between neighbours in times of crisis and allow aid to flow more directly.
Social Roots is a co-op still working on its decentralized protocol integration as of the time of writing. Its purpose is to build tools to enable democratic self organization, with a focus on how to build networks of autonomous groups with shared power and removing the silos that exist between groups.
I found each of these projects interesting on different axes; as an organizer, as a technologist, and as a human struggling with answering the question of where the potential for technology that enables positive change fits into my life. Each of these give me hope in different directions, and I hope that at least one of them inspires you too.