Looking back at 2024 and a summary of ideas for what comes next

This year marked the eighth year of DWeb – since 2016 scores of us have gathered in the redwoods, in the halls of Greco-Roman buildings, on the beaches of California and Brazil, in hackerspaces, on the Playa — and online, spanning international time zones, languages, expertise, and interests. Over these years, DWeb has become a dynamic community of dreamers and builders creating alternatives to the dominant, centralized and corporate internet. We want to build a web that manifests trust, human agency, mutual respect, and ecological awareness. And DWeb is a space for thoughtful conversation and finding the collaborators and resources to bring decentralized, distributed, and local-first networks to life. 

DWeb Camp 2024

By many accounts (and feedback survey responses), DWeb Camp 2024 was our most successful camp yet. It was our fourth Camp, with more than 520 people flying from all corners of the world to meet in the redwoods of Navarro, California. We held our first Demo Night Market, where 32 projects showcased their working code, allowing campers to try out and provide meaningful feedback to builders. We held over 420 sessions and workshops over five days and this year we brought 25 DWeb Fellows from 21 countries across Europe, North America, South America, East Asia, South Asia, West Africa, East Africa, and the Middle East.

You can read some of the reflections about this year’s camp here, here, and here. While we are taking a break from holding Camp in 2025, stay tuned for details on DWeb Camp 2026.

As we close out 2024, let’s look back at the other highlights of the year.

DWeb 2024 Highlights

Virtual Meetups — We held eight virtual meetups this year, with topics covering governance, cryptography, AI, project funding, and more. You can check out all of the recordings of our past meetups.

Local Node Meetups — Across our local Nodes, there were over 12 in-person meetups in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Vancouver, Hanoi, Buenos Aires, Burning Man Playa. See more below on ways we’re planning to grow the DWeb Node network next year!

What were some other notable happenings in our ecosystem?

DWeb For Creators Course — Gray Area designed and offered its first online course focused on DWeb history, principles, and practice in the spring. If you missed it, you can find all the open source content and also take the course again this coming spring 2025.

Bluesky’s Massive User Growth — Many of the core team of leaders and developers at Bluesky have been a part of the DWeb community. The network relies on content-addressed content and is working towards making “credible exit” possible, especially in light of the major exodus from X-Twitter. So while it’s debatable whether it’s truly a decentralized social network from a technological perspective, we cannot help but feel like this is a big step forward for the DWeb movement (note: the back and forth written exchange between Christine Lemmer-Webber and Bryan Newbold is worth checking out ICYMI).

We’re sure we missed some other highlights from 2024 — tag us on our social networks so we can boost your successes from the year on Bluesky (@dweb.bsky.social) and on the Fediverse (@dweb@social.coop)!

What’s Next for DWeb in 2025

When the DWeb organizing team decided to take a year off from holding Camp in California, a big part of our decision was weighed by our desire to work towards decentralizing the movement. Our vision in 2025 is to support the growth of DWeb nodes around the world, empowering and aiding them in hosting DWeb gatherings big and small. Rather than focus on one big convening in Northern California, we will be supporting smaller regional gatherings in Vancouver, Taiwan, Healdsburg, and Brazil. 

But we want to hear directly from the DWeb community and understand what you want to see happen in the coming year. So at last month’s virtual DWeb meetup, we asked: how could DWeb better support our community’s goals in building a decentralized/distributed Web? And how do we each want to contribute to help support this network? 

Following a short presentation from core organizers about the events and projects we’d like to pursue next year, we opened the floor for an open discussion. Following that, the 60 or so of us present divided into small groups and discussed what we’d like to see next for DWeb. You can find the recording of the whole meetup here. 

Here are the highlights of what we heard:

Let’s Walk Our Talk

Many expressed the desire for us to do more to highlight the projects and best practices for replacing the “centralized, attention hijacking, surveillance technology” of the dominant internet with “decentralized technology that supports human values including autonomy, personal data protection, privacy, etc.”

People felt that we should find ways to encourage participatory design by building bridges to communities to better map needs to solutions, and solutions to needs. A key to this (repeated by many across) was that people find it really helpful to receive feedback on their projects. They want to understand how their tools can work better, and how they can get collaborators and financial support. One of the main ways people find value in the DWeb community is to allow people to share their projects to make them more usable and viable. Offerings by people included holding branding / UX design workshops and working with the DWeb Principles to make them more robust and actualized.

DWeb has a robust website with resources on DWeb technologies and analysis, but it currently needs some brushing up and updating. One person desired specific resources for counter-surveillance measures for high-risk communities including indigenous and queer communities. These types of resources would be critical in showing how DWeb can be immediately useful for those who are in urgent need of alternatives. 

DWeb Project Directory

An oft-repeated desire that we’ve heard is for a DWeb Project Directory, where people can find aligned projects, affinity groups, and potential collaborators. People want to know where the DWebbers are! 

Such a curated directory could map individual people’s skills, interests, and locations for people to interact and post topics/needs/projects for them to find each other. It was particularly noted that it should include non-developers, with people skilled in communications, UX design, organizational and governance design, fundraising, community management and more. The directory could be shaped by select community members, and also be used to shape an ecosystem map to visualize the domains of decentralization happening across the network stack. 

Nodes Network and In-Person Gatherings

There were calls for decentralizing the technological infrastructure of DWeb. One of the main ways we hope to achieve this is by growing our Nodes network – where people within a region can meet in-person and have regular local get-togethers. We’ve heard that a toolkit and support system would be helpful for those wanting to get their local Node off the ground. One person said that they wanted to help set up local nodes around the DWeb Principles “that go beyond the technology layers to involve social governance and way[s] of living / growing.”

On that note, there’s a growing contingent who would like to see a kind of DWeb residency, where people would go to a place for a period of time to work on a project together and co-create the experience, much like Camp. There have been Hacker Houses that have done something similar, and they tend to meet alongside related events such as Ethereum DevCon. There are a few folks in our midst who are already (or are interested in) experimenting with co-living. They said that they’d like to try a similar model with the residency using a benefactor model, where people could live somewhere for a certain period, with all their expenses paid, so they could collaborate in person on building DWeb infrastructure. This would also entail building relationships with people on the ground who live there, who want and need the kinds of tools that would be created through the residency. 

Many would also like to see a DWeb Calendar, which people could add events to and subscribe to directly with their calendar app of choice. One person said “it would be incredibly supportive for dweb as an attractor of brilliance and credibility to endorse distributed events who apply for said endorsement.”

Virtual Gatherings and Communications

DWebbers want to continue to see virtual meetups happen throughout the year. Some suggested that the virtual meetups can be more experimental, with meet and greets where people can be invited to share asks and offers. But a few people suggested that in lieu of meeting at Camp, there could be a big virtual summit that takes place to bring people together virtually for a few days — much like DecentSocial from a few years back.  

We could also do a better job of providing ongoing news, updates, and publications across the DWeb ecosystem. Many echoed the fact that they wanted to make sure that they didn’t miss any big updates. So people suggested a DWeb News Digest – where people could also describe their needs, request specific help, post or offer jobs and opportunities. It was noted that it would help to establish a habit amongst the community to see this as a kind of clearinghouse for DWeb news. This would likely have to interface with the Directory mentioned above. 

And lastly, the topic of storytelling came up across the groups. Those new to the space don’t quite understand what DWeb is and its community’s values and approaches. DWeb regulars note that they continue to participate in DWeb because it energizes both the “heart and the head” and that they’ve come to know the community for being “rigorous intellectually and generous in openness”. A regular DWeb Blog with writings and media could help better reflect how our values can be embodied in the technologies that we build.  

*~*~*~*~*

With all the challenges in the world and a shifting landscape in the U.S., we don’t know what’s in store for us in 2025. But as the DWeb Organizing Team, we truly look forward to continuing the conversation and maybe even seeing you at some of the events planned in the new year. 

Upwards and onwards!

With gratitude,

DWeb Core Organizing Team