Today’s technology discourse is home to a loud demographic who equates decentralization to both blockchain applications and “Web 3.0”. But these newly minted advocates don’t seem fully aware of the failures (and successes) of web decentralization projects that may not have had such buzz about them.
Here is a just a brainstorm of some of my favorite projects over the years that made decentralization a critical element of their work.
The 1989/1990 braindump from Tim Berners Lee that became the basis for the world wide web. “Non-centralisation” was considered a requirement for its use at CERN.
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
My first exposure to the XMPP protocol was through the hacker community’s insistence of its use. The open standard lent itself to helpful features like off-the-record (OTR) encrypted messaging and federated server deployments unique to the communities who used it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XMPP
Limewire seems to elicit so many warm memories for people who at some point used the P2P software to listen to their favorite music.
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/ap708n/limewire/
A project spun off of BitTorrent’s P2P protocol, Resilio is like an end-to-end encrypted P2P Dropbox. I love it! I just wish more people used it. 😂
https://www.resilio.com/individuals/
While by no means free and open source software, I have considerable respect for AirDrop for putting such an easy-to-use P2P file sharing application in the hands of millions of Apple product users.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirDrop
One of the best parts of the recent blockchain obsession is that it had propelled further adoption of IPFS, or “Interplanetary Filesystem”, as cryptocurrency projects seek to make use of its decentralized storage capabilities to host static assets of their projects.