Looking Ahead to Another Big Year Together
DWeb: Looking Ahead to Another Big Year Together
As the year comes to a close, we are looking back at 2024 and looking forward for what comes next in the new year.
This year marked the eighth year of DWeb—since 2016 scores of us have gathered in the redwoods, in the halls of Greco-Roman buildings, on the beaches of California and Brazil, in hackerspaces, on the Playa and online, spanning international time zones, languages, expertise, and interests.
Over these years, DWeb has become a dynamic community of dreamers and builders creating alternatives to the dominant, centralized and corporate internet. We want to build a web that manifests trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness. DWeb is a space for thoughtful conversation and finding the collaborators and resources to bring decentralized, distributed, and local-first networks to life.
With all the challenges in the world and a shifting landscape in the U.S., we don’t know what’s in store for us in 2025. But as the DWeb Organizing Team, we truly look forward to continuing the conversation and maybe even seeing you at some of the events planned in the new year.
Photos & Videos from DWeb Camp
It’s still a work in progress, but our archive from DWeb Camp 2024 is close to completion. You can view most of the media from Camp at the link below. The full collection should be complete by the end of the year.
Thank you all for your patience! ❄️ ☃️ ❄️ We’ll be away on winter break from December 23 to January 3 ❄️ ☃️ ❄️
COMMUNITY NEWS, UPDATES AND OPPORTUNITIES
- Brand Lab at Devcon 7: At Devcon 7 which held from November 12 to 15, 2024, DWeb Camp’s Creative Director Ira Nezhynska hosted a mini-version of the 5-day intensive brand and storytelling program planned for 2025. Ira also gave a talk at Devcon 7 about cypherpunk visual language, subcultural movements and the power of aesthetics to accelerate or slowdown mass adoption. Read more about it here.
- Connecting DWeb nodes in Cascadia: The large population centres of Vancouver, Seattle, and Portland share stewardship of this ecological system with the many Indigenous communities that continue to reside in region.Now the DWeb community introduces new connections, weaving the region together even tighter. Members of DWeb Vancouver travelled across the border for the relaunch of the Seattle DWeb Node on November 19th, 2025. Seattleite DWebbers, joined by visitors from as far away as Victoria BC and southern Washington state, gathered to hear some short talks, socialize, and make new personal connections at the Internet Development Studio, a cool new hub for creative technology near the famous Pike Place Market. Learn more about the meetup here with pictures from the gathering available here.
- Can aesthetics uplift the energy around such a heavy topic as migration? The 2024 DWeb Camp theme 'Migration: Moving Together' united 500 protocol builders to explore how decentralized tech can address global challenges around migration for nations and communities worldwide. Read the reflections of DWeb Camp’s Creative Director Ira Nezhynska on the visual identity and creative direction that went into DWeb Camp 2024.
- How decentralized is Bluesky really? Many of the core team of leaders and developers at Bluesky have been a part of the DWeb community. The network relies on content-addressed content and is working towards making “credible exit” possible, especially in light of the major exodus from X-Twitter. Some debate whether it’s truly a decentralized social network from a technological perspective. There’s been some recent conversations on this topic. See the written exchange between Christine Lemmer-Webber and Bryan Newbold.
- Saturday, January 11, 2025—DWeb Local First Weekend: The first DWeb Local First weekend will hold in January next year. This will be a weekend of shared learning, coding, exploring the emerging technologies and principles of this new kind of software. Participants will learn about the broader DWeb movement, local-first technologies and hack on some projects. Find out more here.
- OPEN CALL: Apply to be a part of the Cultural Memory Lab by February 2, 2025: Gray Area, TechSoup, and the Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web have teamed up to launch the Cultural Memory Lab, an incubator and microgranting program that seeks to sustain publicly accessible digital archives. The Cultural Memory Lab invites organizations from around the world to propose a project that leverages decentralized technologies to preserve stories historically excluded from archival practices. Selected projects will receive up to $5,000 in funding, access to Gray Area’s DWeb for Creators course, and dedicated technical support from the Filecoin Foundation. Find out how to apply here.
If you have any events or community updates to share, email us at dweb@archive.org so we can share them with everyone! Thanks for reading!Questions? Write to dweb@archive.orgStay in touch via our Matrix Channel, Discord, Bluesky, Mastodon, or X. Our mailing address is:300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118Want to change how you receive these emails?You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.