The Fathers of the Internet Urge Today’s Software Engineers to Reinvent the Web
Ok, a lot of people don&#x27;t know the context for this.<p>Last week, the Internet Archive ran the Decentralized Web Summit. It was an opportunity for new projects [1] to gather with prominent people in the industry [2]. It was productive and very fun. It also resulted in a bunch of news pieces, like this one, which have been hitting the HN FP for a week. Some of those articles have been better than others; a lot of them feel like fluff to me. (There are some semi-interesting bullet points buried at the bottom of this one.)<p>What <i>was</i> interesting, was the level of focused energy that this event was showing. The Internet Archive did a great job organizing it, and the speakers were compelling, but the real drive came from the different teams that were present. The news orgs all focus on &quot;Recognizable name calls for new Web,&quot; but those speakers only offered spiritual guidance to something that&#x27;s moving entirely on its own. And, I think they&#x27;d be the first to say so.<p>There was plenty of self-awareness and open discussion. Kahle gave a good talk at the end of day 1, where he pointed out that nobody quite knows what the end-user&#x27;s interest is here. Are we talking about &quot;open-source websites?&quot; What&#x27;s the big picture? Doctorow, Baker, Kahle, and Lee all talked about values. Cerf talked about Named Data Networking, which is about content-addressing, an idea that&#x27;s definitely at the heart of the new work. Zooko threw cold water on everybody (&quot;Is this just 1999 again?&quot;). It was very interesting. A lot of it is online [3]<p>1 IPFS, Dat, WebTorrent, ZeroNet, InterLedger, MediaChain, Neocities, many others<p>2 Vint Cerf, Mitchell Baker, Tim Berners Lee, Brewster Kahle, Cory Doctorow, many others. RMS even made an appearance.<p>3 <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.decentralizedweb.net&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.decentralizedweb.net&#x2F;</a>