A reputation service linking Twitter and web3, version 0.0.1 by Raphael Roullet and Jay Graber, funded by the Ethereum Foundation Reputation is the key to trust. People spend years building up their reputation on centralized social platforms, but they have to start from nothing whenever they start using a new…

In decentralized social networks, communities can set their own moderation policies, but what tools are available for enforcement? There is no central authority to make network-wide moderation decisions. Instead, content is filtered through an interplay of interfaces, algorithms, social consensus, and protocol constraints. This post looks at technical approaches to…

An early developer of the cryptocurrency Zcash on how Steven Levy’s ‘Crypto’ inspired her interest in privacy — This is part of the Marker series “Read Like a Boss,” where founders, CEOs, and leaders in business reflect on books that revolutionized their thinking, framed their career, or aided them in a crucial business decision. Crypto starts with the story of how Whit Diffie invented public-key cryptography. He became…

Using blockchains for monetization and data storage — My previous post on decentralized social networks analyzed the differences between federated and p2p social networks. This post will provide a survey of social applications that have incorporated a blockchain into their design. Social applications that use a blockchain are decentralized to varying degrees. Some use a blockchain for data…

Comparing federated and peer-to-peer protocols — Efforts to decentralize social networks hope to structurally change the balance of power in favor of users by giving them the ability to change services easily and control their identity and data. Calling a network “decentralized” only defines it by what it is not — it is not dependent on…

Distributed file systems — A core component of decentralizing the web is how you store and share data. IPFS and Dat are distributed file systems that can provide data storage for the decentralized web. They can be thought of as essentially next-generation versions of bittorrent. This post will compare the high level and technical…

“I have participated and contributed to events that have significantly reduced the power of middle management and which have placed powerful information tools into the hands of unlikely people.” — Lee Felsenstein On the last night of the Decentralized Web Camp, I was hanging around outside after dinner when an…