Decentralized Web

We meet the 4th Saturday of every month, 4-7pm, at Noisebridge.

Introduction

Liberating the world through free, local-first, and decentralized technology.

The internet is the physical, interconnected computer network that runs TCP/IP to link devices globally. Upon it, a sea of protocols flows enabling the globalized world we live in. One such protocol, http, was the first to bring the internet to a broader audience, one that spans the world, the World Wide Web. Other protocols followed, and with the adoption of ECMAScript (i.e. javascript), we get what some call Web 2, which was also characterized by centralization. Some people use Web3 to describe efforts towards a Decentralized Web, though in practice when people say "Web3", 99% of the time they mean proof of work or proof of stake, neither of which is the focus of this meetup. Hosted at Noisebridge, the anarchist hacker space, we want to build digital anarchy, where at a protocol level, we engage as equal peers. In other words, we gather to weave a decentralized web.

These meetings will consist of presentations and discussions (and hopefully 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 progress. Additionally, we will aim to define and start new projects.

Current projects

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

Meeting Notes

• 2026-01-24
• 2025-12-27
• 2025-11-22
  • Attestation I
• 2025-10-25
  • Haitus
• 2025-09-27
  • building services with 4th amendment protections.
• 2025-08-23
  • Gnunet: Locking the Internet Open.
• 2025-07-26
  • Free, local-first, and decentralized AI
• 2025-06-28
  • Guile + Nix -> Guix
• 2025-05-24
  • Workshop: Bridging our Gardens

• 2025-04-26
  • Michaelz: Why decentralization and How?

• 2025-03-22
  • Zacchaeus: How Do We Self Organize?

• 2025-02-22
  • Michael Toomim: Braiding a WoO on the Decentralized Web

• 2025-01-18
  • Justine Tunney: LlamaFile
  • Greg Slepak: Group Income and/or Chelonia

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 maintenance 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-scarce ones and zeros that make up our digital culture has been made artificially scarce by Copyright and Patent Law. To break free from these bonds of artificial scarcity locking up our software, 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 centralized middlemen, and allow an individual to support individual contributors, 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 customizable, 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 incur 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 non-free 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/receiving 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 each other.

Licensing Note

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