At the December 2021 DWeb Meetup, dozens of booths gathered in gather.town for a fun, virtual, get-to-know-you holiday fair. There were 30+ booths of DWeb projects, foundations, start-ups, organizations and protocols sharing their vision for the decentralized web. Attendees were able to stroll through, chat, listen and learn from each other. Presenting projects came from every part of the world!

The Holiday Fair was inspired by the festive holiday fairs of Europe. They were an opportunity for participants to see what is happening in the DWeb space, learn about new technologies, find partners, supporters, team members or funding. Projects welcomed feedback and ideas, and explored opportunities for collaborating!

Booths present at the fair included:

• Agregore, a minimal web browser for the distributed web. It integrates peer to peer protocols with the web to simplify creating and sharing apps without the internet. Its goal is to make local-first software easy to make, and to make technology more resilient and easier to make.
• Anwen/Dweb Lab which is a DWeb content community exploring Dweb Lab, Dweb Search, Dwebverse: open-source mmo 3d and vr game.
• Blue Link Labs & Paul Frazee which is developing a new project building a decentralized, self-hostable cloud using Hypercore Protocol and other Web3 technologies
• Briar, a messaging app designed for activists, journalists, and anyone else who needs a safe, easy and robust way to communicate. Unlike traditional messaging apps, Briar doesn’t rely on a central server – messages are synchronized directly between the users’ devices.
• Decentralized Future Council, a new initiative committed to educating policymakers in Washington about the future of decentralized and interoperable protocols that will transform the Internet as we know it.
• Earthstar Project, a P2P protocol and accompanying library of APIs for building collaborative and social applications, designed for human-sized (1-100) groups that already know and trust each other. This project is ideal if you want an online space where you can just be yourself, someplace safe where strangers won’t hassle you, or a place to build tools that are really tailor-made for your community, with a simple, blockchain-free API.
• eQualitie builds free and open source software on decentralized infrastructure and protocols in support of free speech and access to knowledge. It also showed its CENO (short for Censorship No!) Browser, a mobile browser for storing and sharing blocked web content, as well as the team’s newest project, OuiSync – a tool for securely synchronizing and sharing files. Both projects have been developed with the backend support of the open source Ouinet library for enabling peer-to-peer functionality, which can be integrated into many other third-party applications. 
• Filecoin Foundation presented about its grants program seeking to: A) Accelerate the adoption of open, decentralized technologies; B) Build communities of practitioners, users, and champions that are mutually supporting and self-sustaining; and C) Communicate the values and benefits of open, decentralized technologies to wider audiences
• Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web which welcomed conversations about a vision for a better, re-decentralized internet, and how the Foundation might be able to help.
• Fluence Labs, a peer-to-peer application platform which allows the creation of applications free of proprietary cloud providers or centralized APIs. Fluence provides a peer-to-peer development stack that allows for programming p2p applications, workflows, and compose services, APIs without relying on centralized intermediaries. Fluence’s p2p platform provides a complementary compute layer to IPFS, enabling a wide variety of decentralized use cases.
• Handshake, a naming protocol that is backwards compatible with the existing DNS system. Every peer in the Handshake network cryptographically validates and manages the root zone, which completely removes the need for the Certificate Authority system (CAs). Names are logged on the Handshake blockchain, which is essentially one big distributed zone file to which anyone can add an entry.
• The Hyper Hyper Space project aims to make decentralized applications easy to build and accessible by everyone. At the booth, participants could discuss how to power Dapps with data objects that can be instantiated anywhere (even inside a web browser), used offline and easily synchronized over the net!
• ImageSnippets – discussing metadata delivery service layers around art/imagery within the context of decentralized protocols.
• IndiView, a personal interest project in privacy which built an app and a decentralized network for communicating with friends and family. The network node is designed for self-hosting and implements a digital identity API. The mobile app supports sharing of contact details, photos, videos and chatting through the network.
• The Internet Archive, the Library of Alexandria for the digital era, which is experimenting with storing web pages, film and audio in decentralized storage –at scale! Participants could meet team lead, Arkadiy Kukarkin.
• Jolocom which is looking to empower every individual, organization, and entity capable of identity to freely communicate. Jolocom provides universally accessible and useful solutions for decentralized identity management.
• Least Authority, a technology company supporting people’s right to privacy through security consulting and building secure solutions. A leader in the security of distributed systems, Least Authority offers consulting services, develops privacy-enhancing products, and contributes to the advancement of related open source and human rights projects.
• Mask Network which aims to bridge the Web 2.0 users to Web 3.0 by bringing the decentralized application ecosystem onto traditional social networks, the Mask extension provides a decentralized option for features Web 2.0 users are familiar with. Users can enjoy secure, decentralized social messaging, payment networks, file storage, and file sharing without leaving mainstream social media networks.
• The Matrix Foundation which is the Foundation responsible for the Matrix protocol and its healthy evolution. Matrix is a federated protocol which is mostly used for instant messaging, but not exclusively. One of the other applications is full mesh VoIP. They are investing into Matrix P2P as well to have portable identities, completely independent from servers, so people are in full control of their account.
• Media Enterprise Design Lab, University of Colorado. Nathan Schneider’s CommunityRule is a governance toolkit for great communities. How does your community work? Are you ready to make hard decisions? Too often, we leave the most basic questions unstated and unanswered. CommunityRule makes it easier to clarify the basics so you can focus on other things. They showcased their prototype Web app and gathered ideas for the next-stage revision now in progress.
• Mysterium Network, an open-source, Swiss-based Web3 project making the internet borderless and accessible for all. Their decentralised ecosystem of protocols, tools and web infrastructure provides more privacy, anonymous expression, and equal access to information. The project’s flagship product, the decentralised Mysterium VPN, is available for Android, Windows and Mac. Anyone can join the peer-to-peer marketplace to rent their unused bandwidth and IP address to a global community.
• OneCommons, an early-stage startup dedicated to building a free and open cloud. The open-source platform lets you build, share and fork open cloud services that are location independent and support built-in funding mechanisms. Its mission is to realign economic incentives to nudge the Web away from the Attention Economy — based on maximizing a user’s attention at whatever cost — to an Intention Economy, where participants fund what they find worthy.
• Peergos, a p2p, E2EE secure file storage, social network and application protocol built on IPFS. Peergos is building the next web – the private web, where end users are in control. Imagine web apps being secure by default and unable to track you. Imagine being able to control exactly what personal data each web app can see. Imagine never having to log in to an app ever again. You own your data and decide where it is stored and who can see it.
• plan.tools, a community-centric content creator platform for collaboration, world building, and immersive experiences. PLAN is bridging together previously siloed industries using distributed ledger technology (DLT), p2p infrastructure, 3D graphics, open protocols, and realtime collaboration interfaces. Its vision is that the future internet will be powered by collaborative spaces built on a framework that is community-centric, off-grid capable, inclusive, as well as private and secure by default.
• Quark, the browser that shows paths across the internet. It incentivizes the expansion of Web 3.0 to users at large with an interaction design approach. Imagine if you can bump into people looking at similar online content or search results, see where they’ve been, tag along to discover content together, and even monetize it via live stream. With Quark, you can build a collective map of the internet.
• SHER, the decentralized live audio platform. That’s right, with SHER you can create your own shows. Have multiple streamers, play files and more. You don’t have to install anything, it works on your browser! Take the broadcast studio with you.
• Skynet Labs, an open protocol for hosting data and web applications on the decentralized web using the Sia blockchain. Skynet decentralizes “the cloud” so that user and application data is not stored by (and only accessible to) a single, central authority and allows users to access it without any specialized software or cryptocurrency.
• Socialroots enables functional cross-group communication, decreasing the time it takes to manage work and partnerships, and increasing engagement and productivity. Wicked Co-op LCA is an NSF funded worker owned co-op building enabling software technology for DAOs and decentralized networks of organizations to coordinate more effectively. 
• Starling Lab. The USC | Stanford Starling Lab is the first academic research center in the world dedicated to exploring how Web3 technology can transform human rights. They work with historians, journalists, lawyers to securely capture, store, and verify human history using decentralized technologies.
• Sutty, a worker-owned cooperative developing a FLOSS platform for managing and hosting static websites and e-commerce. We work for and with NGOs and grass-root organizations in Latin America and we want to share with you why we think this is an opportunity for DWeb’s growth!
• Virtual Chair facilitates the organization of efficient and effective virtual events by focusing on three priorities: interaction among participants, dissemination of materials, and broadening participation. With Virtual Chair, organizers can easily take full advantage of best practices for virtual events.
• Webrecorder. Webrecorder’s goal is to make it easier for anyone to create, store and access web archives using open source tools. One of our current efforts, supported by the FIlecoin Foundation, is to standardize a format that can be used to create and render web archives directly in the browser. The format makes it possible to load web archives from IPFS as well as a local file system, or any online storage, decentralized or centralized. Webrecorder’s motto is “web archiving for all” and we are working on several tools to enable decentralized web archiving using the browser itself, allow anyone to create personalized archives of their own web browsing.

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