Miss the last meetup? Watch the recording!
Recording: DWeb Virtual Meetup on Bluesky & Beyond
At the last DWeb Meetup in February, we had hundreds of community members tune in for a lively conversation about Bluesky, AT Protocol, and the future of decentralized social media. The meetup explored what building alternative social networks looked like including efforts, considerations and questions around creating an open, interoperable ecosystem of social networks. Speakers included mai ishikawa sutton, Senior Organizer, DWeb; Mallory Knodel, Executive Director, Social Web Foundation; Bryan Newbold, Protocol Engineer, Bluesky; Boris Mann, Organizer, ATMosphere Conference.
If you missed it, watch the event recording here.
Recording: DWeb SF February Meetup on Decentralized, Local First Solutions
In February, DWeb community members also gathered at the SF node’s meetup for an evening of talks, demos & dinner centered on decentralized, local first solutions and values-driven decentralized technologies. The evening's main speaker was Secure Scuttlebutt Researcher and Professor, Christian Tschudin, who demostrated TinySSB, the lightweight implementation of Secure Scuttlebutt that allows for P2P communications, messages, Kanban boards, and sharing audio files. It also featured presentations of Basic.tech by Rashid Aziz and Abhi CVK as well as Bubble by Justin Fairchild. If you missed the chance to join in person, watch the video here.
Funding the Commons’ Infrastructures of Resilience, March 15 & 16 in SF
This weekend, Saturday, March 15 and Sunday, March 16, 2025, join researchers, policymakers, builders, and funders at the 12th edition of Funding the Commons. This event will confront the future of AI, Web3, and digital public goods—not as idealized commons, but as contested spaces requiring intervention, governance, and resilient alternatives.
The Internet Archive’s Mark Graham will be kicking off Saturday at 10am with a deep dive into the Archive's work preserving Biden-era websites and how they are changing with the advent of the Trump Administration. On Sunday, Wendy Hanamura from Internet Archive and Ethereum Foundation’s Aya Miyaguchi will have a fireside chat exploring the values, decisions, challenges, and future direction of the Ethereum community. Learn more and register to attend here. We have a limited number of VIP Passes for DWeb community members. Write to DWeb@archive.org to request one.
11th Hour Project Funds Projects From DWeb Camp
One of the most tangible outcomes from DWeb Camp 2024 is the funding directed by the 11th Hour Project in support of Awana Digital, DWeb Camp Brazil and Conservation Metrics.
Sam Oslund, Program Director of the AgTech division, was a major funder of DWeb Camp and helped create an exploration of new ways to fund Agriculture Technology called D:FoodWeb. Check out some of the contours of an emerging, alternative innovation ecosystem in Agriculture tech here. Rudo Kemper, Senior Technical Lead of Conservation Metrics reported: “Attending DWeb Camp again last year was definitely a highlight, and I'm really glad to have met Sam, and that it led to some confirmed funding for both Awana Digital and CMI! With the support of 11th Hour Project, we hit the ground running on some very exciting extensions of GuardianConnector, our community data governance platform, to support the integration of biodiversity data. We hope to share more about that later on in the year.”
COMMUNITY NEWS, UPDATES AND OPPORTUNITIES
- Community Member Reflection: ‘Putting government mandates and speech codes between platforms and users is an approach fraught with constitutional obstacles and unintended, adverse consequences. Policymakers should instead seek to decentralize control over the web and give the power over public discourse back to the people. The early internet pioneers envisioned a democratic digital environment that upheld the values of liberty, localism, community, and personal agency. Digital activist John Perry Barlow famously called cyberspace “a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” These pioneers wanted to build an internet where power was decentralized — where communities could voluntarily form and flourish.’ Read more on How to decentralize control of the web by Luke Hogg | National Review.
- March 10-16, 2025—Ethereum San Francisco Week 2025: ETHSF'25 is a decentralized, week-long event series across the Bay Area, featuring events focused on d/acc, blockchain, AI and beyond. There are over 45 events happening across the week. Learn more and get tickets here.
- Saturday, March 22 and Sunday, March 23, 2025—ATmosphere Conference, Seattle: The ATmosphere Conference is a 2-day event featuring a selection of curated speakers, lightning talks and demos about apps, protocol features, and an unconference for community organized topics of interest. The mission of this first conference is to connect those building, supporting and using AT Protocol powered apps, infrastructure, and community. It is a chance to connect in person, to plan, learn, and collaborate in building an open social web. If you’d like to attend, learn more or present at the conference, find out more on the conference page.
- Saturday, March 29, 2025—Vancouver Hack Day, Personal AI: Own your AI! With open models becoming more and more powerful, what new types of applications can we create with AI agents that run securely and privately on our own devices and data? How would they interface with us and each other? Interested in exploring these questions? Join the DWeb Vancouver hack day to explore how to build local-first AI that works for us. Participants will learn how to install and interact with their own models, on their computers, phones or even in the browser. Learn more and register here.
- Interested in attending What Hackers Yearn (WHY) 2025? WHY2025 is a nonprofit outdoors hacker camp taking place in Geestmerambacht, the Netherlands (approximately 42km north of Amsterdam), from August 8 - 12, 2025. The event is organized for and by volunteers from the worldwide hacker community. There will be knowledge sharing, technological advancement, experimentation, connecting with your hacker peers, forging friendships and hacking (everything from computers to food) are at the core of this event. If you’ll be interested in collaborating around this event, reach out to DWeb Camp’s Creative Director Ira Nezhynska who is planning to attend via email iryna@nezhynska.com.
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.