How to Build a Decentralized Web That Truly Works for All

Hello everyone and thank you so much for joining us today um for the the latest segment of affecting change EFF live stream series where our panelists tackle the latest issues in civil liberties and human rights in and technology in the digital world. My name is Bab. I am the director of um director of public interest technologies at the electronic frontier foundation and I have the honor of opening the space for today discussion. Before proceeding we have a few housekeeping item to go over. First we will be recording the session but only video of our speaker will be included. You can join us now in the official chat via Twitch by going to eff.org/livestream org/livestream. In the Twitch chat, you can drop your question throughout the program and our guests will answer as many as they can at the end. If you're comfortable, we encourage you to type a hello in the chat window now and let us know from which part of the world you are joining us from. We also have a live caption team online with us today. You can view the caption at liveream.eff.org. For those who are not familiar with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF is a nonprofit comprised of technologist, activists, and attorney. Since the '90s, EFF has been fighting for your right to create, innovate, and make yourself heard by anyone willing to listen without fear of unjust government or corporate surveillance. You are the reason EFF can take on this important work. And if you would like to help us in the fight to defend your judicial freedom, please consider donating at eff.org/supportchange or picking up some cool EFF gear at shop.eff.org. With the housekeeping out of the way, now it is my honor to introduce the participant in today's discussion on privacy defender. We have Bruce Schneijider, public interest technologist working at the intersection of security, technology and people. Mallerie Nuttle, feminist technologist who transform technology for social change through people center cyber security and multistakeholder. Rory Maher, director of open access and tech community engagement at the EFF. As a reminder, we'll have about 15 minutes for your question at the end. So if you haven't touched if we haven't touched on something you want to hear about, please ask. You can submit your question via the Twitch chat at any time. So 25 years ago, the internet was built with the promise of freedom, openness, and interoperability. 25 years later, the internet as we know it looks very different. Most of our online experience now happen on platform owned and managed by a small number of people small number of companies. Sorry. These company have enormous control over our data and how it's used and monetized. They get to make decision about what kind of speech uh I allow on the platform, how and with who we engage and the algorithm that shape what we see can actually create silos between communities rather than bringing us together. For the past several years, technologists and advocate have been grappling with the question with a with a with one question. How do we reclaim some of the original promises of the internet and is decentralized uh or decentralization uh part of the answer? So that's where I want to start the conversation today. So before we talk about decentralization, what is the problem we actually trying to solve and what um what has the internet increasing centralization cost us? And I want to uh turn uh this to our guest speaker today and we can start any one of you can start or happy to also uh call you out. I will go maybe what I can see on my screen maybe Mallerie you go first. >> Sure. Yeah. Thanks for inviting me to this conversation about that. It's really nice to be here and to be talking about this topic. I think it's um really important these days and I really feel like everybody's feeling it, right? This notion of initification. Like I could literally reach over here and grab the book on that. We've all been hearing that word. There's just so much I think that we've been that we've just gotten used to um in being in these walled gardens and being in these corporate controlled spaces that we kind of have forgotten like what a sort of open web experience is like. Um even though you know both the web and the internet itself are pretty revolutionary in the way that they're architected to be super open to be you know interoperable. Um there's there's just so many possibilities there and I feel like we've just enclosed things over time. Yeah. Like it's enclosed markets. It's captured attention. Um but I just kind of feel like our experiences are also so limited for that reason. Um and definitely we're going to get in today, you know, my feelings on, you know, feminist power um and the ways that tech can help with that. Um but I just kind of start out by thinking about like gosh, it really just could be better and it's not. And that's I think the the fault of the corporates that have sort of taken everything over. >> I I can stand on your question. Uh what matters is power. Fundamentally this is about power whether it's concentrated or distributed. And I disagree that we don't have any uh notions of what a distributed internet looks like. We do. It's called email. Anybody can have an email address from anybody and anybody can send email to anybody else. uh nobody controls email. Nobody's in charge of email. There's no corporation that will limit your access to email or what you can do with it. It is right. I mean there were many of these protocols right uh 40 years ago in early years of the internet. We've lost many of them but email remains. I mean compare that with WhatsApp or any of the the corporate controlled systems. And the difference is whether the systems concentrate power in the hands of increasingly you know large tech monopolies or they distribute power and and that's important that's important for pretty much everything we're going to talk about how these systems intersect with power. Yeah, I I totally agree. You both uh put kind of my two thoughts better than I will, but I do see it as like the deitification side of it. Uh that there internet has collapsed for most people into a handful of thiefs of corporate power costing us uh privacy or autonomy just uh adding stress to our life in many cases. And people really feel that that uh when they go online it's a home feed that's like making them angry. they like creepy ads that make them think they're being listened to in their own home. Um, and many young people are just skipping out of uh social media altogether because of that uh power being exerted over folks and people feel. Um, and on at the same time there's like a nostalgia and this uh desire to rew. I grew up with like stumble upon and finding weird singlepurpose websites and uh that sort of freestyle expression uh that I think a lot of us who remember that version of the internet uh miss and want to kind of reclaim without losing the benefits that did happen in the interiming time. I I wanted to follow up on a point that Bruce raised um that this is about power. So I wanted you Mallerie and Rory to um chime in here. So the the the cruc of this challenge or this conversation is not about like decentralizing a technology but it's about power. Do you agree with that? And like what's your experience with that Malori as a technologist and a feminist and like Rory how how would you how do you approach this from an organizer? Absolutely. I mean, I think it's really maybe like useful to remember that this originally was going to be a session at Ritscon in Zambia in May, right? And I'm so grateful that you had this brilliant idea to bring us here in this live stream, but like that was a really for folks who don't know, right? There was meant to be this human rights conference in Zambia. It was shut down at the very last minute. Very hard to reorganize. Thousands of activists were going to come. Hundreds of sessions were going to be held. this one included, but many others on topics varying across the spectrum from civil rights, you know, feminist tech, um, whatever, right? And that that silencing that the possibility to silence a a movement like that that's been going for over 10 years, um, is a good example of why feminists kind of have this two-pronged approach to strategy, right? One is you protect, you keep a safe space where you can do your thing, right? and you challenge power. And the cool thing about decentralized internet or decentralized web uh protocols for me is that it's the same strategy. Like those are two thing like you can achieve both of them with this. And I I really appreciate that. I feel like this is why I um I call myself a feminist. I think about tech from a feminist perspective because it's a power analysis. It's fundamentally about power analysis, understanding who the actors are, understanding what you can do to change it, and also what you can do to protect yourself from it. So, you know, we need our own spaces. We need to be able to create speech platforms that are um that endure, that are durable against all manner of power because we're seeing it in so many places, right? Like this is a moment in time for the whole world where, you know, speech is just not protected anymore. the human rights are really not nobody's really standing up for them. There's just, you know, there's so much going on. There's so much turmoil and these things fall to the to the bottom of the priorities list. Um, we have to be able to build those movements online. And one way we can do that is with decentralized protocols because it's permissionless like we don't have to ask and you know we can we can create that durability. >> Totally. Um I totally agree and it's yeah it is an old discussion in organizing and I think sometimes uh when we use decentralization or centralization uh that can sometimes uh hide that we are talking about power um and there's a difference between decentralization uh in a power vacuum where everyone's kind of doing their own thing and what I see as the current moment of building a counterpower of building a deliberately decentralized uh challenge uh to that centralized source of power um online so that I think is part of why it's such an exciting time to move forward in the space. >> Thank you all. Uh so my next question is is going to be around now let's talk about like decentralization or decentralized protocol. Um so when we talk about a decentral a decentralized web what are we actually talking about like what becomes possible in a decentralized system that is difficult and impossible on the internet as we know it today and any of you can start or I'm also happy to call um call you out. >> Well the web is the decentralized system. >> I mean it's like email anybody can put up a website. You could put a web server on your computer on my computer on someone else's computer. You can have Google hosted. You don't like Google, you can move it somewhere else tomorrow. It is completely and totally decentralized. What is centralized are some of the platforms on the web. Facebook is centralized. If you don't like the way Facebook is uh showing you your feed, you have no choice. They even prevent you from building a front end that will show you your feed in, I don't know, reverse chronological order or any other way you might want to see it. So right now the web is decentralized and centralization tends to creep into systems because power likes power right power accretes right Facebook wasn't like this when they started they became like this as they got more powerful and this is the initification metaphor so what we want are decentralized systems on the internet we want interoperability we want control we want the ability to have a say in the tech that has become so important in our lives. >> Yeah. And to put a finer point on some of it, right? Like why is it that we keep getting trapped in these platforms when we do have the freedom to move or we build we can build other things because as you're saying like the lower layer protocols are open. Um I think there's like a few dynamics going on. Folks have named these eloquently over time. Um, but I also want to point out, you know, like I love the email metaphor because I also do a lot of work in encryption and it's pretty centralized. Like almost, you know, a really high percentage of all email whether or not you have a Gmail account or not goes through Gmail, right? Because a lot of people do. So, you know, this happens when no matter what when you know the protocols alone are not enough. But I wanted to point out a few features of the protocols that address directly some of the issues with social media platforms. The first is obvious. It's like you go where your friends are. You go where you want to have influence. Um, and right now those audiences feel separate from one another. And that's on purpose, right? Because of the ad uh ad provision, right? You need to be able to say like we will sell you this ad space and here's these are the eyeballs you'll get and so on. So you you create it you make it easier to switch or you make it easier to consume the content off the platform like you were saying Bruce like with a client right or with some other you know mashup of the content. Um and so I yeah so being able to so the decentralized web allows you as a person or an account or an institution or an organization whatever to have a pres presence where you would prefer and to still reach people beyond the the borders of that um online presence. So across platforms and so on. You can also switch. you can like pick up your stuff and you can put it somewhere else um if you need to if there's um closes down or changes or whatever. Um so those are really important, right? Like being able to talk across platforms, being able to move, pick up and move where you want, take your friends with you, take your content with you. Um so yeah, decentralized web protocols have those features. They're explicitly designed to enable that sort of thing. Rory, do you want to come in? >> Uh, yeah. Um, sure. I think, um, yeah, when we talk about centralization and decentralization, um, it can get really high level really quickly and we're talking about abstract complicated tech and abstract concepts. Um, so to kind of try to root it in an analogy I like to use, um, is that this sort of centralization might seem natural in our social media use, but it's actually pretty unnatural in a lot of other very human contexts when you think of your own social life. Uh, the sense of like who you are at work versus at home, uh, versus with your high school friends. Um, and the ease that you're able to move between those contexts and bring people with them. like you can have a co-orker uh go to a bar and meet some of your other friends. Um if you apply this sort of centralized model to the real world in real social life, um it would look like checking with your landlord or your boss if it's okay to stay friends with your old coworker or roommate. Um, and I think it's like this very uh unnatural exertion of control over folks uh that we've kind of just come accustomed to because it seems like it's part of the deal that if you want to have online communications, you need to have this. Um, and the technology we're talking about today is really about challenging that um, and finding um, ways to make it easy and not and more accurately not deliberately difficult to do that and live your life online that way. And um thanks Bruce for centering us here. Again for the for folks listening uh for the purpose of the of this conversation we're talking about decentralized systems not like the web. So Rory you work with activists you know ordinary people dayto-day. I'm curious to know from your perspective um how how ordinary people who are not technologists like Malaru Bruce are approaching this conversation uh what are the opportunity that they seeing with like decentralized system and centralized systems. >> Yeah. I mean I think often it comes up um in organizing spaces when we're talking about uh resiliency um and talking about things like censorship. It's very common for organizers to have their Instagram account unceremoniously uh banned and then they have a lot of trouble uh reaching the same audience that they have. Uh so in social media it's often adopted as sort of a fail safe or a way to uh kind of preserve those connections. But we also see in things like disaster relief people adopting uh outside of social media cool tools like meshtastic um that enable them to keep communications over radio waves when uh yeah other infrastructure uh fails. So I think uh there is this thing this maybe feature of centralization of you can move really fast but it's really unstable and unresilient uh when it comes to disasters ranging from uh political disasters, natural disasters, technical disasters. You don't want to be one bad update away from uh losing uh all of your data um or be wrapped up in the next breach. Uh so I think it's a really pragmatic approach from organizers um of what is going to keep us able to continue doing our work. Um and unfortunately even really great technically centralized tools like Signal will go down sometimes. Um and it's something that organizers are increasingly trying to factor in uh in their work. >> Thanks Rory. And so my next question let's go back to the system and I think it's for Mallerie and Bruce. Um when we talk about decentralized systems um we we think about them at least like uh for the average person we think about them about a possibility offering a possibility of greater freedom privacy user agency and autonomy resilience as Rory has mentioned and control. So from a security and system perspective, uh what gets harder uh when we decentralize systems, Mallerie, I don't know if you want to go first. >> Oh, I was hoping Bruce would go first. >> All right, I'll go first. [laughter] >> Thank you. >> What what we lose is centralization. I mean, a benevolent dictatorship is pretty good if they're benevolent, right? So when you have a centralized system where like you're in charge, then everything is smooth, everything works together, everything is easy because there's one central person in charge of making things good. Of course, the downside is they turn evil and then it all goes bad. But so the the lure of centralization for us is that it makes it easier. It's why some people will choose the Apple ecosystem over the Microsoft ecosystem. Apple ecosystem is more centralized and it is it's a seamless system. Things all work together. There's less problems because there's a there's a dictator. You go into uh either Android or Microsoft and and it's less of a dictatorship. It's more decentralized, still pretty centralized. Then you move into, you know, very decentralized systems and governance can be a real challenge. you know, all of these internet systems like the web which is decentralized, email which is decentralized. I mean, there are loose consortions of experts that are vaguely in charge as long as they all agree with each other. You don't want to know like how this stuff actually works. So, that's what you lose. >> Yeah, that some of that stuff is pretty pretty tough, you know, like the malware, spam, and abuse working group. Um, they meet three times a year. I mean, it's it's a lot of work for some folks. And it's true with the domain name system as well. Like folks sometimes like to dunk on the DNS because there is there are forms of power um in that system. But it is pretty decentralized. It's pretty global and they like all of I can basically exist to govern that and the governance is what you need when you have these decentralized systems because you know I think we're going to get into this a little later. You know there are issues around things like you know spam, malware and abuse. There's things around um content moderation. There's stuff that you need to deal with when it comes to like technical designs. How do you move the technology, the underpinning technology forward together once people start using it? Um new versions of protocols become really hard because they have to be backwards compatible. You know, there's a lot that goes into these decentralized systems. Luckily, we have, you know, again, we're building this on top of the web. So the web already is in this position, right? There's standards body plural for that. Um, but yeah, it it really is a lot faster and easier if you have control of the service, control of the endpoints, control of the software, you know, and you just feed people the changes. Um, but yeah, I think the alternative um, you know, is is probably worse over time. It's actually not as durable to be centralized. Um, and then just like the last >> What's that? >> Please go Bill, please finish. Well, I just wanted to say something that I'm sure you can pick up on, Bruce, which is that security becomes a little different. I mean, it doesn't necessarily it's not exactly a tautology that decentralized systems are less secure, but for something like, you know, secure messaging or things like that, once you start opening it up to interoperable platforms, you have to worry about other features in the security ecosystem and harden for those things where you didn't have to before when you could control all all of the endpoints, >> right? it becomes more challenging because there are multiple sources of of of structure and of uh of sustainability. But again, that assumes a benevolent dictator, right? Centralization is good with a benevolent dictator. And centralization occurs naturally. I mean, think about uh Bitcoin, which was designed to be decentralized and is incredibly centralized. [laughter] It's centralized in mining. It's centralized in governance. It's centralized in wallets. software and everything other than the protocol which is decentralized has been centralized >> naturally because power creates power. You have to fight to keep systems decentralized, right? I mean we talked about email which is highly decentralized. Mallerie made the great point that in fact Google controls a lot of email and between Google and Apple and maybe we can name five others, right? That's probably most of the world's email. Doesn't have to be that way. It's a fully decentralized system, but it turns out it's easier that way. >> Uh, and Bruce, you talked a little bit about um, uh, governance when it comes to like decentralized systems. I guess for a decent for when we talking about decentralization for this conversation and focusing on system, how does like moderation could work here like the governance who get to make the decision? Because as much as we hate the centralized platform, they have a wellestablished business model and infrastructures, engineers, security system that you know are not great but they are they established like how do we then ensure like how do we do that with decentralized system and how do we ensure that as we are building this system we are not um making or we're not recreating some of the centralized system or cluster that we had with the Korean platform. All >> right, it's hard and we often fail at that is is the answer, right? The internet is governed by the ITF, the internet engineering task force that controls the protocols, the internet governance forum that controls uh some of the other things we mentioned. I can that controls domain names. So these are decentralized sources of centralization. ITF you got to show up, right? So it's the the power is limited to people who have the time and money to show up at the meetings, get involved in in the protocols. Sometimes centralization happens naturally. You know, in in blockchain, it's because, you know, they're naturally the way to do mining is is consortiums. So a few consortiums have have popped up that do all the mining and and and there's no way to ensure that they are representative that they are good because that act of ensuring is itself a centralization who gets to ensure that person is a centralizer. So there is this this tension between centralization and decentralization that is always going to exist. I don't know, Mallerie, do you want to comment? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I I think that, you know, we're not starting from nothing. Like, we've we've been talking around some of these protocols, but like the social web protocols I'm thinking of are um you know, activity pub at Proto. Somebody in the chat mentioned Solid. There's other like uh DSNP. Yeah, that's the right acronym, right? And you know, there's there's ideas, right? There's ideas. They're not we're not starting from nothing. We've also had social media for a while, right? Like I like to remember, you know, we like independent media um kind of started the idea of web 2.0, right? You could just go up and put a po put information about a protest on the web. You could um you know, drop your uh the images from the protest and the you know the video that you took and put that on an intermediia website or something and then you know we have social media. So I'm just saying we like we have a lot of experience with this. We don't have to think of it think up new things. We can also leverage these existing governance mechanisms that Bruce talked about, right? Um that we and and we can also I think this is my view maybe controversial. We can try to think about morphing or like extending what we've already got with the walled gardens. like we it we've seen it happen before where changes have been made often under duress often after really really long campaigns by folks like EFF and you know ACLU and CDT like really trying to push for the right move in a company but you know you can imagine where we could say okay well the issues around content moderation for like extreme content right illegal stuff really terrible things like there already kind of are emerging uh protocols more like um processes norms that get put in place so that you don't have to take the same content down from like a dozen websites. They kind of all in the back end are able to share these signals and that's that's exactly how like spam mitigation works in email, right? They the ecosystem has developed implementers of these protocols have developed signals that that they can share with each other. Um and I think we can do that. We can expect that you know these are all public these are all efforts in the public interest. We should be thinking about how we can make something like a content moderation mechanism like community notes or um you know the cool the brilliant work of like Snopes and other fact checkers um fake fake videos and stuff that like the C2PA protocol and the witness folks are working on make that stuff protocol-l like so that we can share it right and that helps a lot instead of thinking like oh well if I'm going to start a new social media website like I've got these protocols I can build a thing on top of it but now I also have to deal with like the problem of spam and like atrocious user accounts popping up and you know I think we can like leverage what we've already got. >> Yeah. And I'll add I think uh to latch on to the word ecosystem there I think gets back to uh this resilience question of uh a decentralized web also means a more diverse web and that comes with a lot of strength of having different options parallel options uh that you're not relying on Mark Zuckerberg to get it right that when there is a failure in that centralizer terrible benevolent dictator [laughter] >> benevolent >> yeah a dictator though uh but yeah So you get that sort of um precarious like the failures are big, they're fast, and you don't have a lot of democratic control. Whereas in a decentralized system, uh you know, even today, if you're in decentralized social media, you can kind of choose between maybe more fetverse where it's like a small community that's really deliberate about moderation and careful about outsiders. It can be more of a fire hose blue sky with just a few basic filters. Um and you can mix and match uh systems as we improve uh their interconnectivity. And I think uh that is one of the perks that uh the floor can be raised through having many options and not being stuck with whatever is fed to you. >> Thanks. Uh Bruce, you mentioned earlier that there's this tension between decentralization and centralization. Um and and I'm thinking about like the governance and moderation issue that I mentioned earlier. Do you all or maybe you Bruce think that even with like decentralized protocol there's still an aspect of centralization especially when we're looking at like moderation and governance. >> I mean there always is going to be and it really depends what we're doing. I mean like a decentralized protocol is still a protocol. So who's the group that defined the protocol or even get out of computers? I mean, I I really think on this planet we have global problems that need to be solved as a species. Climate change, migration, and AI, and and local problems, who picks up the trash? And the stuff in the middle tends to be what's not working. So there's always going to be aspects of whatever we're doing where we need to be together and there are going to be aspects where it is very much the small groups that are near each other. However you define near in in the environment you're in. Uh nothing is entirely decentralized and really nothing is entirely centralized. So yes, it's always going to be both. >> Mallerie, what do you think? Do you agree with that? I mean, I think that brings up a really interesting model, right? Like I think it's been several years now where we started to challenge this idea of the global community. I actually think it was Zuckerberg who talked about that first or like made like brand tried to brand it, right? And then everybody's like, "Wait a second. Is that really what we do? Is that what we're trying to achieve?" I mean, I think maybe, right? There is some there's some value in thinking about um you know, political scientists have done a lot to think about the public sphere. Um but again maybe that's local maybe that's really about um your jurisdiction your region I can see as well like topics right like I think of a feminist movement as being necessarily global in fact like you know better better that it's from the bottom up right global south to global north like it would be um you know it's not what we're looking for if we try to um keep our ideas hyper local you it's about I I was sort of activated by the um anti-glob globalization movement which um you know somewhat ironically is about building global solidarity against capitalism, right? So we're like we're both like pushing back against this idea that companies are crossing borders to wreak havoc on markets everywhere and we also are crossing those same borders to build solidarity movements against those things. So you know I think we we want to keep to that intact to some degree with some like purpose you know behind it. Um, but yeah, really I mean that's that's one thing that really I think we could keep in our sites is the what for? Um, it's really something we think a lot about at the Social Web Foundation where you know we're excited about the protocol. We're excited about the platforms that are building on that protocol. But like for what though is a really important question that we answer with working on human rights, working on civic space, working uh with feminist communities because we build for those use cases. Um and everybody else flourishes as a result is the idea. >> Yeah. I don't know Rory if you wanted to come in or I'm happy to. >> Yeah, I can. I think um yeah I'm just thinking of a lot of the more positive framings of the digital sovereignty discussion which is complicated issue we don't have to get super into right now. uh but uh there are strains of thought in it that are about this not having an internet totally dependent on a handful of companies that all happen to be in one country and um yeah Europe for example is doing a lot of the things that we like to see of investing in open source friendly alternatives um and um looking at interoperability as a requirement uh backend interop so apps can talk to each other data portability um and I That's a lot of the policy directions that will enable uh a lot of these benefits that we're talking about that we can have a global solidarity to not be all uh global north over global south. >> Yeah. We were like a year ago in the internet governance forum which Bruce already mentioned in Norway talking about yeah like could we get the European digital markets act to name social media as a kind of platform that could be that could have gatekeepers obviously does have gatekeepers. could they, you know, regulate name it in the regulation um because we've got the protocols, we've got the use cases, like let's let's make this uh real and really bring more people already in these platforms in into an open decentralized uh ecosystem. >> Earlier I want to shift gear and talking about the business model. Now earlier I alluded to the business model of centralized platform being well established. I guess my next question is like who pays for this? Who pays for the decentralized or decentralized system? Who maintains it? Like is it how do we sustain it? Is it um just human with good fate? Um again like I who pays for this and how do we sustain this model? >> I mean all sorts of options. Uh the internet is largely people doing it because they want to right. uh to uh I think Mallerie's question that that that there are security implications there. We were seeing uh enemy actors, you know, sneaking in and and maliciously changing things because no one's in charge. Uh Wikipedia, who pays for it? The public pays for it, right? they're they're a 501c3 and they get uh they get donations and so they have centralization but they're very much a distributed encyclopedia and and so it is paid uh in through uh through that way. I mean the the the conceit and the question is if capitalism doesn't do it, who will? And it turns out there are lots of ways that aren't, you know, a bunch of people making a lot of money. If we build the systems and they're working and they're useful, they get maintained. [clears throat] and and it it's nice to see alternate ways of of of governance emerging that aren't, you know, a bunch of people making a lot of money. >> I want to blur that contrast a little bit as well of uh these big centralized platforms also often rely on a great deal of unpaid volunteer labor for moderators. Um, so it's moving from moderating and having some billion-dollar company profiting off of you versus like it directly being for the community you're supporting. Um, and hopefully throwing a few bucks to your instance host. [laughter] >> I mean, it's not even just the moderation or it's the content. It's our content. [laughter] >> Yeah. >> It's all it's entirely ours, right? This whole notion that like capitalism has never invented anything is actually like pretty true when you look at the internet, right? they just it's a shell for everyone else to do their thing. I think that's the answer, right? Is like once you um take that on board really I think there's a lot of innovation that gets unlocked. And I use that word on purpose like I don't throw around the idea of innovation but I was talking about this sort of early on. It's like we don't even know what people are going to come up with. And we're really stuck right now in our imaginations because we've spent 10 plus years in these platforms that have told us we get a couple buttons. We get a like button, we get a repost button, and then we can write things in the comments. And like that's it. And how can that be it, right? How is that possible? So, I know we can come up with better stuff. We've just not been given the opportunity. And I think one of the reasons why business models have felt really hard in the decentralized web is that we've got our limited imagination, not our fault. And we've been held back. Like there, it isn't just that we don't have good ideas. We just have to remember that at every turn, the incumbents are pushing back on our ideas and they are wielding power over us. And so we just I mean, we do need to sort of build some collective power around this because it's not going to be easy. I don't think we should expect it to be easy, but it will, I think, produce way cooler stuff. Like look at um uh like WhatsApp in Africa. Like it's completely hacked. Like people do not use like the off-the-shelf WhatsApp app anymore, right? It's so much cooler than that. They have all these mods and things like that. I mean, that's obviously unofficial, right? But this is an example of how like modern day what we would call hack hacking or like h activism really comes up with awesome ideas and we don't need to hack these systems. We can just build them because the protocols are open. Um so yeah I think there's a lot of good that will come. Creator did not used to be a job. Citizen journalist did not used to be a job. Who knows what will be a job in the next handful of years. Sky's is the limit. I wanted to just say that's a really great point of like this creativity and innovation is actually being held back by these big platforms um attacking creators that are making these really interesting cool alternatives. Um we remember from a few years ago Reddit shutting down the API and like reducing the delegability or people being able to interact on their own terms with it to bring it down into everyone's in one app. Um, and we also see plenty of projects um, come under kind of bogus claims around computer fraud and abuse act um, or ownorous terms of service or ULA um, lawsuits and we see these legal mechanisms that are in desperate need of reform um, ef.org/fight that uh, you can uh, see actually stifling a lot of this creativity that people want to bring to the table. >> And in the AI space, it's even faster. Remember prompt engineer went from we never heard of it to became an actual job description to disappeared in like six months. >> Okay. So what I for decentralized system we need people with good faith just like presuming um kind of like what we discussed with this question. I guess Mallalerie this question is for you and Bruce and Rory feel free to um come in. How do we ensure as we are building this movement of decentralized system we are not leaving um folks from who don't have the same access as in North America or the US Bruce talk about like people going to the IETF but a lot of people wants to get in and they don't know how to get in and so my concern is that if we see this as easy as like well everybody who has time can do this we are not recognizing some of the challenges that other people who are from other part of the world have when it comes to access or having a meaningful seat table. So how do we ensure that we are including all the voices as we are building the decentralized systems and I'm asking this question because of your background working with ABC and multistakeholderism. I hate that word and I say it I just said it. >> That's a hard it's a hard word. It's like many many syllables. Um no I it's it's a good question beet. I think you're right to ask it because we think of the endusers on the platforms but really with an ecosystem like this there are going to be if we get what we want right lots and lots of intermediaries folks running servers folks building whole new platforms folks building the clients that you that you can use regardless of platform you can build services that crosscut all of them like content moderation or other really fun things so there's just so much there and Um luckily I mean we I think we're living in a time when people are excited to experiment with um coding things right because they can use AI to to build stuff. Um there's also just a so much sharing right people are building stuff and have been for years right have been building um you know mastadon uh pixel fedge blue sky there's just a lot of stuff out there that you can take play with and you're encouraged to to try to build on top of it so I know it's tough I'm not necessarily suggesting people go to um standards bodies but if you would go to a standards body it is so helpful and instructive to have had your hands around the technology to have built something and to kind of show up with your list of requirements and constraints and thoughts on how it's currently working with, you know, gentle suggestions for changes or extensions that nobody's thought of yet. And I think that's kind of how we grow it in the long term. And it would be great to have a diversity a much greater diversity of people um in those places for sure. >> Thank you. One last question for our panelists before we get to from me at least before we get to Q&A. Most people at least ordinary people don't wake up thinking about like I need to move from I want to go to a decentralized uh system. Uh although they hate being on meta or X. Uh what is the one if you had one thing that you can say or tell people who are listening? What is that one thing you can tell folks to encourage them to think about decentralized system as this opportunity that we all have to reclaim uh our freedom on the internet >> think less about decentralization and more about less power. So, it's not about going from, oh, I don't know, from uh Twitter to some randomly decentralized thing. Maybe it's going from Twitter to Blue Sky, which you know is centralized, but it's better because it's not as big a power center as uh as Musk's company is. So, there are places you can go. WhatsApp, right, is owned by by Meta, owned by Facebook. signal is not so you can move there. So there are moves you can do that move you towards decentralization and it turns out you often have a better experience on these platforms. I mean kids these days are not on Facebook on Instagram that's for olds you know they're running little private chats in Discord or on on Signal right so they're not fully decentralized but they're more decentralized. It's a continuum and it's really about pushing away from the uh the tech monopolies uh to alternatives. >> Yeah. Um I'll add Yeah, I think it's hard to narrow to one because I always like am popcorning ideas for this, but I think encouraging folks like you don't have to be super technical. uh you don't um you know have to be even that deep into policy but kind of solidifying uh this idea of like the network effect of this will be more useful as more useful things are on it and I think thinking of it as a more social or political change of you can get uh your workplace your school um or even as part of government procurement contracts like pushing for this important information that enables people to act more uh freely um incompatible with these systems and it can be as simple as just creating one more account that also happens to be interoperable um and it can scale up to you know convincing people to host their own work. Um so I think there's a lot of different angles with that if you're interested in kind of mobilizing people and actually helping reach that tipping point where it is more viable for more people. Yeah, I really I think we should all be asking, demanding, pushing for the existing platforms to be liberated basically. Like I just want, you know, my next door neighbor, the folks that I know that are still on, you know, Facebook, I want them to know that they could ask for something else. I don't know if they'll be heard, right? But I think that's a strategy we often forget is like we could just try to liberate everybody, right? I think there's a I I get overwhelmed by the idea of asking everybody else to start a new account or to move, right? Because I get anxiety when I think about all the accounts I already have. Like just so many and I I'm delinquent on most of them. If you follow me on social media, like I am not there. I should be, but it's hard to keep up, right? Um so instead of moving people, can we just like think about liberating them? Can we get all of the existing platforms to be using these open protocols or open parts of the protocols so that it doesn't feel like, you know, to share with my friends a really funny meme I saw that I have to take a bloody screenshot on my phone, crap it, and then upload it into the group chat. Like, it just feels like that's not why we built the internet, right? Like we want to be able to link things. We want to be able to share things. It would be really nice if we could if we could do that across platforms. So that's my answer to your question. >> Well, thanks. Um, thank you so much for 45 minute conversation so far. I want to go back to the Q&A. Um, we have a lot of questions, an interesting one. Um, the first one, and I'm sorry if I'm mispronouncing the username. I think it's name Leitz. uh who asks, "Isn't there also an aspect that power trade that people trade power for convenience?" >> Of course, >> of course. >> Yes. [laughter] >> Um and I'll add I think with decentralization doesn't have to mean inconvenience. Um I think kind of following Maller's last point of like if you uh make the existing apps and platforms participate in it uh then you can benefit from decentralization without changing what site you're already using. Um and I think uh in a decentralized system it doesn't mean perfectly uh spread out and everything is exactly 50 users or something. Um, but you can have a few big easy to use kind of onboarding um, services and uh, then people can find their own way to the weirder [laughter] edge case ones. >> Yeah, just agree. Yeah, like it doesn't have to be hard, but it often is. And I think just like being able to that's where a lot of I think innovation is coming in is like figuring out how to make that smoother. Um, but yeah, it's real. >> Uh, next question is from username green frog boy. What do you think of Tin Burners Lee startup solid that aims to give people more ownership over the data and privacy? >> I'll take that because I'm actually uh part of uh the company that is commercializing that. Uh so Tim Berners Lee has a protocol distributed data ownership and it's very powerful. It is something that gives data back into the hands of people. It is inherently decentralized. It is inherently distributive. It is anti- power. So I am 100% in favor of it and I think it's think it's a good thing. It's hard. It's hard to push it through because power doesn't want it. Power likes uh having your data and doesn't want to give it up. >> Totally. Yeah. And to broaden it, that sort of idea of data portability is really important that um it comes up with email, for example, that if you're switching email services, you do want all of your old emails to also be on your new email service so that you don't lose all those old communications. And it's the same thing with social media. Uh if you can move uh your data, you're more free to choose the services that you actually want to use and aren't stuck using uh because they made it inconvenient. Uh we have our next question is from username's name lit again. If provider are small they are motivated to ent inter entropate sorry struggling to pronounce interropability. When they get critical mass they are incentivized to close off from the risk. How can this be mitigated? I guess I think um of like things that have been hard to enclose like podcasts. Apple has tried really hard to enclose podcasts. Even YouTube kind of is doing a pretty good job because of the video thing with podcasts, but nobody has managed to do it yet. And I think it's well it's a it's a decentralized system, right? RSS, we love RSS, but also um you know, people just don't consume podcasts in the same way. Um, and that's also maybe true of email to some degree, although I think webmail and Gmail have just like crushed this idea. But like I really love an email client and I could really see clients taking off. Like in the federated, you know, Activity Pub worlds, there's a lot of clients out there and I really love that because you can um it's the same content, but you can log into it and and look at it in a different way. And this takes the power out of this enclosure that we're talking about when it gets really really big. The way they try to enclose it is with like fancy features usually like that you can't get elsewhere. And the antidote is often just like you know you've you've consumed it another way. The feature is elsewhere. The feature is not in the platform. The the data is in the platform. The feature is in the client. The feature is in another place. Um, maybe I'm talking really abstractly, but I just feel like there's a real opportunity to maybe I'm going to say it like AI like uh being able to like access things with different and new stuff like the shakeup of the the web agent, the shakeup of client um applications. The the smartphone did this with apps, right? Um, it could be an opportunity to think about to separate really like the consumption and the platform from the where the data is where the data is and where the user accounts are. And that could I think be a durable long-term solution for thinking about how like the service will continue to endure. You can stop dealing with the bells and whistles on the platform which often yeah do like try to grab you and pull you away from competitors. I actually think I also agree that AI is going to be decentralizing. I mean, as much as OpenAI Anthropic wanted to be centralized and then in power, turns out they have no moat, that there's competition that's free, that the switching costs are zero, that there's no vital business model at all. and and Mallerie's right that people will use that to connect disperate systems to do their own thing to sort of make these easily make these things their own in a way that hasn't been possible before. I'm actually optimistic here unlike everybody else on the planet. >> Um I also say mandating it [laughter] you have to have backend interoperability um is something we're in [snorts] favor of. >> That'd be nice. And by that he means adversarial interoperability that uh you have to be things have to be interoperable whether whether the platforms want them or not. >> Uh next question is from user name. I'm just going to spell this out. E SRUSA. Uh security engineers. What can we do to help decentralize the internet and reclaim some of it centralized power? The fact that no one's answering shows you how hard that is. [laughter] >> Yeah, it's tough. I mean, I do think there are some elaborated problems with problems. There are some new and novel questions for interoperable systems when it comes to security with when you have like assuming you have like multiple providers and you know one provider can't fix all of it right they can't um and I think some of those are really maybe boring mundane details and it and right now we kind of do have that to some degree right like um you know Apple and Google will sometimes get together and collaborate like on a thing because they need to solve like a hard technical problem. Like you'll see little clusters of companies like coming together around some of that if you're a security engineer and paying attention to some of those details. It'd be good if it happened as much as possible in standards bodies. And it would be good if there were some kind of um like decentralized uh web agenda for those things that we know are hard. Like I have a sort of mental list for those hard things for interoperable and encrypted messaging, right? That like decentralization just like introduces a bunch of new things. Um but it'd be good to like think about what those really and truly are for um a decentralized ecosystem. I'm sure some people have, but like let's just start knocking them out um with as much uh like participation from different corners of the ecosystem as possible. Uh, next question is from username. Again, I'm going to spell this out. PH0TMD5. Where can I learn about through decentralized cooperative and internet working technologies under development today to replace the centralized internet? >> And you probably don't want me to say just Google it. [laughter] >> You can go to eff.org. Deflex, right? Google it there. [laughter] >> I don't know. I don't know if we have any uh I mean the internet is the answer to your question and but that's and I don't know if we have anything more than that. >> Yeah, there's some resources on the social web uh so social webbfoundation.org um has some stuff now. I will sort of um hint at the launch of a new website that's going to have a lot more information on it. But I will say like, you know, it is it is hard sometimes to know how to explain these things because they are so vast. They're actually meant to be um really open that you can build almost anything you want on top of them. And that then makes it really hard to describe and like very abstract. So I'm glad we didn't actually like try to do that at the top of this call. Uh beet like that was a smart move like because it can kind of people's eyes roll in the back of their head. But I but I think we found like explaining examples giving examples of how you know um this would work in practice between a community of people distributed in a neighborhood around like a specific project or maybe it would work if you're organ like if you the place you work like your employer like you had this sort of happening like trying to think of use cases is sometimes the best entry point into understanding you know what we mean when we say like yeah you should have like a Facebook group but you should like be able to take it with you or like you know it's like Reddit but you know could also get interoperating with like other stuff too or you know that's the best we can do right now but um thank you also Roy that's a great um you shared a good uh link in the chat do you want to talk more about that I'll just >> yeah um yeah so it's a link um on EFF site uh for public interest internet uh related uh writings that we do and that's where any of our writing on the open social web or decent centralization tech will wind up because we think this is more in the public interest uh future of the internet. >> Cool. Thank you. You know, I was thinking about maybe having some like final kind of like statement to wrap this up, but I actually want to turn this into a question. What should we stop doing today to get us there? We talked a lot about what we were building or what we could do, but what what can we stop doing today as a community to get us to decentralized systems. >> Stop feeding the beast, I guess. [laughter] >> I mean, the more we use decentralized systems, the more powerful they are. This is hard. >> Mallerie said, "No one's on Facebook because they want to be on Facebook." On Facebook because their friends are on Facebook. But >> the more we can wean ourselves from these systems, the better off we'll be. Yeah. Um yeah, I'll say if you're interested in that sort of uh social political level change of um petitioning uh institutions to make the switch, uh you can reach out at ef.org/fight and sign up uh for opportunities to work with EFF trying to make policy more decentralization friendly uh but also organizing opportunities on that. Um, but I think like the most practical thing is like go play with some of these cool tools people are already making. Um, and hopefully when you feel it's a little less intimidating and have a better sense of it, uh, you can be there for someone else who, uh, is also interested in learning about it. >> Yeah, exactly. I'm still focused on like we got to liberate the people who are already online in these wild gardens. Like let's just break them free. But it's a that's actually like a really hard strategy, but not one that we are it's not impossible to achieve it. I think we'll see more and more um the the more we move the center of gravity, the more the companies have no choice but to follow, right? Because they're not doing this willingly. >> Well, with that, um that's all we have time for today. So, I want to thank Bruce, Mallerie, and Rory for joining us today. And thank you to everyone who contributed to the discussion in the chat. All the great question and everyone watching around the world. Uh we've said it before and say it again digital right begin with you. EFF has been a leader in privacy, freedom and and and privacy, freedom of expression and innovation for 35 years and we need your help to keep up the fight. Take 10 minutes now to become a member today at eff.org/supportchange. Uh please please continue this conversation about your civil liberties with your colleague and friends. And once you've done renewing your EFF membership uh we really appreciate you doing that. Be sure to mark your calendar for the next segment of Effecting Change on Thursday, October 8th, where we will be talking about protecting the vote. You don't want to miss that. Thanks for joining us and see you next time. Thank you.