Decentralized web

Decentralised trust model in which people vouch for each other's keys instead of relying on a central authority; put forward by Phil Zimmermann for PGP in 1992.

Software that keeps the primary copy of a user's data on their own devices and syncs it with others, so it works offline and the user keeps ownership.

Naming data by a cryptographic hash of its content instead of by where it is stored. It is the main alternative to location-based URIs: the name says what a thing is, not where it lives.

Graph of data blocks in which each block links to others by their content hash, so any change produces new hashes all the way up; a generalisation of the Merkle tree.

Storage that a person controls, from which applications read and write data with permission, instead of each application keeping its own copy.

Approach to digital identity in which people hold and control their own identifiers and credentials instead of relying on a central provider.

Paul Baran's 1964 RAND memorandum comparing centralized, decentralized and distributed networks, and showing that a distributed network survives attacks on its nodes and links far better than a centralized one.

Tim Berners-Lee's 2010 Scientific American essay defending the Web's design principles, including decentralization, and warning that large social-networking sites were walling users' information off from the rest of the Web.

Juan Benet's 2014 paper describing the design of IPFS.

Brewster Kahle's talk to the NetGain gathering at the Ford Foundation. He argues that the Web is fragile and lets readers be tracked and censored, that 'the way we code the Web will determine the way we live online', and calls for a peer-to-peer Web with no central host.

2016 Journal of Web Semantics paper proposing Triple Pattern Fragments: servers answer only simple triple patterns and clients do the rest of the query, trading some speed for servers that are cheap to run and stay up.

Christopher Allen's essay setting out ten principles for digital identity controlled by the individual.

Ink & Switch essay setting out seven ideals for software that keeps data on users' devices while still allowing real-time collaboration.

Five principles for a decentralized web, written by the DWeb community with dozens of contributors from technology, organizing, academia, policy and the arts: technology for human agency, distributed benefits, mutual respect, humanity and ecological awareness. First shown at the February 2021 DWeb meetup and offered as 'a starting point, not an end point'.

Paper by Martin Kleppmann and eight Bluesky engineers explaining the design of Bluesky and AT Protocol; published at an ACM CoNEXT workshop in December 2024.

Protocol created by Brad Fitzpatrick in 2005 that lets people sign in to many sites with an identity they control, a URL rather than a site-specific account; later versions built on OAuth.

W3C Recommendation (2017) for telling any URL that you have linked to it. The receiving site checks that the link really exists and can then show it, giving the Web's one-way links a way back.

W3C vocabulary and JSON-LD format for describing social activities such as posts, likes and follows; a Recommendation since May 2017.

W3C Recommendation (2018) for decentralised social networking, used by Mastodon and the wider Fediverse. Its messages are Activity Streams 2.0 in JSON-LD, so the Fediverse runs on Linked Data.

W3C data model for tamper-evident digital credentials, such as diplomas or licences, that can be checked cryptographically. Version 1.0 became a Recommendation in November 2019, and version 2.0, with its Data Integrity and cryptosuite specifications, in May 2025.

Protocol behind Bluesky. Every account is a DID with a domain name as its handle. Its schema language, Lexicon, deliberately avoids RDF and JSON-LD in favour of strict, versioned schemas.

W3C specification for identifiers that their subject can create and control without a central registry. DID 1.0 became a Recommendation in July 2022; DID 1.1 reached Candidate Recommendation in March 2026.

W3C specification for attaching cryptographic proofs to data such as verifiable credentials, using pluggable cryptosuites; a Recommendation since May 2025.

W3C specification, a first public draft since March 2026, for giving applications secure, permissioned access to data people store elsewhere, in an interoperable way.

Binary serialization of JSON-LD in CBOR that uses JSON-LD contexts to compress terms and values, reporting results more than 60% better than general-purpose compression; meant for storage- and bandwidth-constrained settings. A W3C JSON-LD Working Group First Public Working Draft since 28 April 2026.

Data model for linking data by content hash rather than by location; the data layer under IPFS, and the basis of AT Protocol's repository format.

AT Protocol's schema language for records, API endpoints and event streams. Each schema is a JSON file named by a reverse-DNS identifier (NSID); it resembles JSON Schema and OpenAPI rather than RDF vocabularies.

Email and file encryption program released by Phil Zimmermann in 1991. Instead of a central certificate authority, users vouch for each other's keys, the model its 1992 manual named the web of trust.

Community, started with the first IndieWebCamp in 2011, of people who publish on their own domains and connect sites with open standards such as microformats and Webmention, instead of relying on platforms.

Series of design workshops on decentralised identity and trust, started by Christopher Allen in 2015, whose collaboratively written papers fed into DIDs and Verifiable Credentials. The twelfth was held in Cologne in September 2023; the thirteenth, planned for October 2024, was cancelled for lack of support, and the papers now survive on GitHub.

Tim Berners-Lee's project for storing personal data in user-controlled 'pods' that apps read and write through Linked Data standards.

Peer-to-peer system for storing and sharing files addressed by their content hash, created by Juan Benet; the alpha was released in February 2015.

Community of the people, projects and protocols building a decentralized web. It grew out of Brewster Kahle's 2015 call to 'lock the Web open': the Internet Archive held Decentralized Web Summits in 2016 and 2018, then DWeb Camp from 2019, with local nodes in cities worldwide.

Decentralised social network built on AT Protocol. It began in 2019 as a research initiative announced by Jack Dorsey at Twitter and became independent in 2021.

Non-profit digital library in San Francisco that runs the Wayback Machine and Open Library.

Open-source research and development company founded by Juan Benet in May 2014; it develops IPFS.

Company co-founded by Tim Berners-Lee and John Bruce to build products on Solid.

Public benefit company incorporated by Jay Graber in October 2021 to develop Bluesky and AT Protocol independently of Twitter.

Company founded by Manu Sporny that builds software for Linked Data, digital credentials and identity.

Independent research lab working on tools for thought and local-first software; it published the 2019 local-first essay.

Payments company whose 2015 gift to MIT supported the development of Solid.

American engineer who at RAND in the early 1960s designed distributed, packet-switched communication networks meant to survive attack, an idea behind the ARPANET and the Internet.

American computer scientist who created the PGP encryption program in 1991 and set out the web of trust in its 1992 manual.

English computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989–1990 and founded the World Wide Web Consortium.

American computer engineer who founded the Internet Archive in 1996 and was one of Open Library's creators.

American programmer who co-edited Activity Streams 2.0 and is listed as an author of ActivityPub.

Software developer who co-edited ActivityPub, the W3C's 2018 standard for decentralised social networking.

Belgian computer scientist at Ghent University working on decentralized Web technology; lead author of Triple Pattern Fragments (2016).

American computer scientist who created IPFS and founded Protocol Labs in 2014.

American software engineer who led the Bluesky project from 2021, incorporated it as Bluesky Social, and was its CEO until March 2026.

Web developer who edited the W3C Webmention Recommendation (2017).

Co-author, with Martin Kleppmann and others, of the 2019 essay 'Local-first software'.

Web researcher listed as an author of ActivityPub, and later a co-editor of Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0.

Cryptography and identity technologist who co-wrote the TLS 1.0 specification, wrote 'The Path to Self-Sovereign Identity' (2016), and started the Rebooting the Web of Trust workshops.

Bluesky engineer and co-author of the 2024 paper describing Bluesky and AT Protocol.

Developer at Digital Bazaar, listed as an author of JSON-LD 1.0 and DID 1.0 and as an editor of Verifiable Credentials 1.0.

Digital identity specialist who co-edited the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification.

Developer listed as an author of ActivityPub.

Developer at IBM when he co-edited Activity Streams 2.0 with Evan Prodromou.

Software developer who co-edited ActivityPub with Christine Lemmer-Webber.

Entrepreneur who co-founded Inrupt with Tim Berners-Lee in 2018.

Member of the DWeb community who, with Mai Ishikawa Sutton, stewards the DWeb Principles and presented their first public version in 2021.

Organizer, editor and writer; as Associate Producer of DWeb Projects at the Internet Archive, a steward of the DWeb Principles.

Technologist and founder of Digital Bazaar who edits JSON-LD and the W3C Verifiable Credentials and Decentralized Identifiers specifications.

Co-author, with Martin Kleppmann and others, of the 2019 essay 'Local-first software'.

Founder of Danube Tech and co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification.

Associate professor at the University of Cambridge working on local-first software and distributed systems; lead author of the 2024 Bluesky paper.

Software engineer and Bluesky's CTO; co-author of the 2024 paper describing Bluesky and AT Protocol.

Co-author, with Martin Kleppmann and others, of the 2019 essay 'Local-first software'.

Director of Partnerships at the Internet Archive, who produced the Decentralized Web Summits of 2016 and 2018 and DWeb Camp, and helps steward the DWeb community.