by Ryoichi Ichiyama

We attended the Decentralized Web Summit 2018 which took place in San Francisco from July 31. This conference brought together engineers, activists, investors, and others from around the world who have an interest in realizing a decentralized world.

The first day of the conference kicked off with an opening party hosted at the Internet Archive. The party featured a science fair where we had a table. At the science fair, we had the opportunity to network, give away some t-shirts and demo our working file transfer code (grp | https://github.com/bunsanweb/grp). During our code demo the fact that our explanations about our basic objects was understood was emboldening. The demo also lead to discussions on whether we had any incentive systems and I felt the strong influence of blockchain in decentralized systems in these discussions.

The second and third days of the conference were held in the rooms of the Old Mint building in downtown San Francisco. Each room featured talks, exhibitions, presentations, and workshops throughout each day. The guiding theme tying these rooms together was the question “how do we leave the web we currently have, with its many problems, and move to a decentralized web?”

Internet technology legends like Ted Nelson, Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Brewster Kahle also gave talks at the conference. Tim Berners-Lee and his team gave an update and showed a demo of their project called Solid. By making personal data and social application systems found on sites like Facebook portable, Solid seeks to create a system that lives on a decentralized peer-to-peer network. However, I came away with the impression that the system being created was closed off within the application. Kahle gave a talk which showed a demo of how existing decentralized storage systems like IPFS could be used to create a decentralized version of the Internet Archive. Having a third party like the Internet Archive use IPFS to power their web project certainly gives IPFS legitimacy and demonstrates their usefulness to actual society. I wonder if the “killer content” for decentralized systems will be a collection of useful but non-flashy tools used widely rather than one thing that appears suddenly and garners a lot of attention.

The bunsanweb project is transitioning from trying to create an app like a new social network on top of bunsanweb, and instead working to split up the bunsanweb’s functions and slowly but surely build up each function. I believe that we should create an environment where programs built on these functions should also be able to grow slowly but surely. The Web works by having browsers going to and interpreting URLs. Many of the functions currently being used as services can be structured as an end-to-end system rather than something that can only be used within that specific service. Therefore I believe that URLs need to be deconstructed so they can be used as an interface for such an end-to-end system. In order to create such a system I believe that the development focus should be placed on the execution and documentation of the underlying code rather than the end user experience.

• slide for our table session at Decentralized Web Summit 2018