In 2016, the Internet Archive convened a decentralized web summit to discuss ways to make the web less centralized and thus less vulnerable to censorship, corporate abuse and "shadow regulation" (I gave one of the keynotes).
Researchers at the MIT Media Lab's Center for Civic Media & Digital Currency Initiative have published a long, very readable overview of the problems of centralization and the technical, economics, legal and social impediments to solving them. They cover efforts like Mastadon, which aim to replace the centralized, winner-take-all systems with decentralized, federated ones, as well as blockchain technologies, distributed infrastructure like Freedom Box.
We offer case studies of the following decentralized publishing projects:
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Freedom Box, a system for personal publishing*
Diaspora, a federated social network*
Mastodon, a federated Twitter-like service*
Blockstack, a distributed system for online identity services*
IPFS (Interplanetary File System), a distributed storage service with a proposed mechanism to
incentivize resource sharing*
Solid (Social Linked Data), a linked-data protocol that could act as a back-end for data sharing
between social media networks*
Appcoins, a digital currency framework that enables users to financially participate in
ownership of platforms and protocols*
Steemit, an online community that uses an appcoin to incentivize development and community
participation in a social network
Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization:
Back to the Future? [Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula and Ethan Zuckerman/The Center for Civic Media &
The Digital Currency Initiative
MIT Media Lab]
