From August 7th - 11th 2024 Marshall, Myriah and David went to DWebcamp at Camp Navarro in the California coastal redwoods. With Marshall and David working together on open source for over a dozen years, it was the first time in 8 years that we got to spend time in person again.
What's DWeb?
The DWeb community aims to connect people, projects and protocols to build a decentralized web. A web that is more private, reliable, secure and open, with many winners — returning to the original vision of the World Wide Web and internet.
Why we went
Having worked in open source for a long time, we believe that there can be a middle ground between the current tech monopolies (and startups that want to be one) and the often thankless work of open source developers working for free on the technologies which are by now foundational to modern society.
We were looking forward to conversations about how technology can become more sustainable not just as a business but also for our communities and the planet. It was also one of the first opportunities to share what we've been working on with Feathers Cloud Auth, a scalable, secure and decentralized authentication system for modern web runtimes.
Internet Archive Sleepover
David flew in from Vancouver a day before and the Internet Archive was kind enough to let early arrivals sleep over at the San Francisco headquarters. A former Christian Science church, it now hosts part of the by far largest digital library in the world.
Sleeping on the pews in the main hall between clay figurines of current and former employees, art projects, and server racks was definitely one of the more unusual camping spots.
Camp Navarro
Marshall and Myriah came in the next morning after a long drive from Utah in their converted school bus.
Reunited in person after eight years, we did a brief tour of the Internet Archive and then made our way on the three hour drive towards Camp Navarro.
DWeb Camp
DWeb Camp 2024 explored the theme of migration and how we can move together toward the Web we want and deserve.
It is different than your typical tech conference. We were particularly impressed by the diversity of the attendees and represented fields of study. Many people in the camp were not developers or tech people at all, but artists, musicians, governance researchers and implementers, activists, and farmers.
It was refreshing to see so many different perspectives and backgrounds come together to discuss the future of the world and how we will shape it with the web.
Feathers Cloud Demo
While spending time in person was the priority and we didn't sign up for an official demo, we were looking forward to showing our DWeb chat app at dwebchat.feathers.cloud to anybody who was interested. It is a local-first chat application that uses Feathers Cloud Auth for user logins and Automerge for synchronizing data. It combines local-first tech with a familiar modern web experience and
- Has secure user logins
- Works offline
- Loads faster than server side rendering
- Deploys like any static website
- Does not require any backend API
- Users own their data and (device) identity
- It is only ~250 lines of code (including markup)
We built the chat to show how decentralized tech can power web experiences that feel simpler while being more secure, private, and user friendly than the current centralized alternatives.
It also shows that local-first tech can be easy to use and deploy for developers. During camp we even put together a chat that works entirely on the local network without requiring an internet connection at all. We feel like it's a nice mix of traditional and new tech, and we're excited to see how everyone uses it in the future.
The Pacific Coast Highway
On the way home, we took the scenic route along Highway 1, the Pacific Coast Highway.
San Francisco Tiny talks
On Tuesday David presented Cloud Auth and our local-first chat at a Causal Islands tiny talks event in a San Francisco community house. It was a great time and there were many excellent questions on how it all works.
You can read a full recap here.
Thank you
At one of our forest stops on the way home, we found an opportune plastic bag on the side of the road. We used it to pick up some trash and hopefully left the forest a little better than we found it. The message on the bag is appropriate to wrap up how we feel.
At a time where the internet seems to be full of impersonal AI content and "enterprise" software, it is easy to forget that technology is made by humans and for humans. Reconnecting in person and with so many other thoughtful people made us hopeful to what lies ahead.