Decentralizing the internet collaboration layer by Andreas [Fileverse] x Ethereum Cyphepunk Congress

uh so today and for my talk I'll try to infuse you all with a little bit of toxic positivity there's been a lot of amazing talks so far today a lot of descriptions of a pretty depressing reality so I think it's quite important to bring something quite different so the title of the talk today is decentralizing the internet's collaboration layer case and point doo. new and Defcon cab. for those of you who were at vitalic talk this first app is what he was talking about uh I think he named it actually um I recommend you try it out I'm sure that you'll you'll find both uh uh the values and the text tag that you all appreciate now super so a little bit of context um for today before I can go deeply into the details over half of all internet users are dependent on a close Source centralized App Suite for their daily knowledge creation and sharing and collaboration it's called Google workspace now the underlying premise of this uh this uh talk is that um you cannot actually have internet Freedom uh if uh your you're surrounded by wall Gardens or trapped in them worse even it fundamentally limits the type of global coordination and collaboration that we can imagine let alone realize and this is uh you know in sociology they call it the affordances of the app what can you do and imagine that you can do Etc now uh I don't think I need to go very deeply into the details of why this is a problem the problem speaks for itself there are constant leaks there are constant uh attacks that we're that we're observing there are uh human Mis misconfigurations or disgruntled employees that want to do a last uh Act of Sab sabotage before leaving their company and fundamentally the the problem with centralization is that you get a bunch of those issues accumulated and um and uh uh basically gives everyone uh much less security privacy data protection in their everyday lives now um okay I I don't need to go through the whole list but some of those big issues are mass surveillance behavioral manipulation uh linkr 38% of web pages that existed in 2013 are no longer accept accessible and this is accelerating especially in news agencies I don't know if you saw the internet archive was down for what four five days uh and a lot of uh links were disappearing uh server outages well the beginning of the Summer started with five six hours of Microsoft Office not being available anymore it cost trillions of dollars to the global economy ridiculous and the last one which I uh put in bold constrained ownership configuration and this is what I meant by it limits our imagination in what can we actually do in terms of collaboration knowledge creation sharing because our tools are basically so constrained that it is almost impossible to think okay what could the internet look like if it didn't have those constraints of cloud-based Paradigm so um there is one uh group of people sorry I there's one group of people that okay you read it uh that um should know this better uh crypto teams communities individuals uh are no different from the rest of the uh active web but uh despite our values our knowledge of what a better system might look like we are still mostly using those centralized apps and dependent on it which is in my opinion it's catastrophic because one of the best things that has come out of crypto even if everything else disappears is the knowledge that we produced over 15 years uh on creating better Technologies coordinating people at a global scale Etc now um to fight that and this is the second part of the talk today uh we at file verse talk about social technical counterposing to all this so not only technical uh approaches and apps tools Etc but also the uh communal uh collaboration that can actually improve the situation um So to avoid capture and abuse are most essential activities and data should leverage open protocols and networks instead of closed products managed by centralized companies pretty straightforward now what does that look like on a technical uh level uh um that layer we like to think of it as a hybrid layer that combines two things on the right you have peer-to-peer networks they've existed since you know the beginning of the internet uh until around 2010 a third of internet traffic was just peer-to-peer interactions and then it started die down and there are a lot of amazing things you can do with peer-to-peer networks but fundamentally they were restricted there was a lack of objective identity there was a lack of guarantees that if you run a code it would continue uh uh running or give you uh uh what you need uh Etc and this is where Community computers another word for public blockchains come in uh in that they offer um incredibly complementary characteristics to peer-to-peer networks if you put the two uh properly together those include uh strict Global consensus uh credible neutrality computation data Integrity intera composability which is amazing which is super important in defi is what you know as you know maker compound a etc uh and this can be reproduced also for social apps uh and more now um you put the two together um and you realize that there are a lot of New Primitives actually and standards that we can take advantage of to create this new generation of apps that doesn't put 3.2 billion people in the same centralized basket that controls their whole lives without them knowing what is happening to their data to their applications or even if they'll have access to them tomorrow I'll list a few of them I I I don't want to go too much over time but you have portable and co- ownable identities portable meaning right to exit take your data go somewhere else uh you have strict Global consensus now accessible via cheap and fast layer to blockchains you have scalable proving systems via ZK snarks you have uh proof carrying data pcds like zass uh portable social graphs go on a different app or interface of the same app bring with you your social connections and don't depend on a server telling you what your Social Circle looks like uh pure based storage content addressing Etc uh if you put some names onto those Primitives and standards this is what it looks like we like to call it the self- Sovereign stack you have safe smart contract U safe uh uh smart accounts you have the FES collaboration middleware you have ens efp for social your social graph you have content addressing and storage layers like ipfs and swarm you have um forecaster and lens which are pretty good examples of that social composability that I was talking about at the beginning Zupas radical for replacing GitHub in a peer-to-peer manner with good encryption Etc hatch protocol for access controls and new cans for user controlled authorization networks uh which is like hats in some ways but it's not on chain it's for offchain exchanges of information Etc no so uh little bit too much written over here so let me make it a bit shorter um now that I've given you a little bit of context on what the problem is uh what opportunities exist depending on what tech uh I'm going to tell you about one project ours uh called fers that uh tries to put together all those New Primitives that have matured over the past 15 years and try to experiment with new types of apps that can rival the ux of dominant apps uh AB Suite without exposing them uh to the friction of uh uh protecting your own data uh and more not require people to go to coinbase first dock themselves put a picture of their cat get some tokens and then fund their wallet to then be finally able to use a Dap no catastrophic as forget about that um we also want to use uh basically our decentralized knowledge and collaboration stack to uh offer by Design data protection accessibility reliability and interoperability guarantees it's not because uh we value those and uh it makes us feel good uh we are delivering that because both governments and people are actually uh uh pushing more and more demand on having these in their apps gdpr and the CCP PA are good examples of that um and it's a it's a good reminder as well that if you're app developer if you're a user if you're anybody in crypto those values uh that uh that relate to data protection accessibility Etc um are not just for show it makes you immediately part of a community uh and standards for technology that uh you know gets you attention from the right people so I might not be very well connected in crypto let's say I don't know vitalic personally but because our app has those things by design it catches uh the attention of uh these types of uh individuals and communities now um uh this is also built and will grow through people's contribution and through open networks rather than behind closed doors and it offers also radically new collaborative capabilities and experiences for example cryptographically ensured co-ownership over shared data spaces and I'll tell you exactly what that means first example for today this is Defcon cab. it's a experiment it's a community experiment that we put together with the Defcon team alongside with a bunch of other teams including uh waku Firefly hats Etc and um the experiment was basically I'll try to make it short but uh when you go to Devcon or any crypto conference I don't know about you but I have 16 telegram group chats uh I have 17 uh notion pages and sheets to follow I have knowledge that is scattered across Twitter threads and I don't know how to find it it's not ideal especially when our community one of its most important outputs is the knowledge that we create at conferences like Defcon so this is basically bringing Defcon on chain uh you can uh get access to it if you have a Defcon ticket so uh we authenticate you via Zupas uh this proof carrying uh data uh Tech um you come here and you can add uh Doo uh you can add notes images files uh PDFs whatever you want and you can relate them to either link them either to some talks to some slides that you saw at Defcon you can join some hubs and discussion Corners to see what is going on in specific areas of Devcon and ethereum communities you can comment chat you have a global chat as well you can DM directly people and all this is built again uh in a way that just shows that we're ready not we fers the crypto space is ready we've had 15 years of accumulating that knowledge and those Primitives and this infrastructure that never stops getting funded it's time to build stuff with it um trying not to say bad words um it's time to build stuff with it so um this has XMP for communication moderation is done with the waku uh um uh agent uh you have ipfs that guarantees the storage of the data Zupas for authentication you have fers for the collaboration real-time collaboration as well comments Etc and finally you also have a um social media aggregator foraster lens Twitter all accessible via this page without you needing an account basically and this is done via Firefly okay I'll finish what sorry yeah uh I'll finish with just uh one last example uh last example is on d.

new uh just to show you you know it's a new generation of Technology you don't need to do things like you did the old ways especially when much better uh ways of doing it uh are are accessible today so uh for this instead of uh listening to my voice I prepared a little video let's see if it works thank you how does Google Docs work it's like okay you know everything goes off into a cloud and like you know like servers like somewhere in America and like I'm not even sure where right and uh the reason why it has to be this way is because people start about collaboration right and people started caring about you know things like not just like me editing a document for myself but like people working together on a documents right and the qu and then you ask like how do you translate the ideals of free software onto a world where like we software just has to be in to fulfill people's and so the vision is Bally you have to have a shared memory and like maybe ethereum can be that shared memory right so like that was the the original web 3 vision and of course I think uh you know the original ethereum ended up not delivering back then uh basically because I know there were the three pieces ethereum whisper and swarm and on ethereum [Music] voila so I'm a bit over time sorry um and yeah uh everything you so is made with peer-to-peer Tech uh with onchain Primitives so please give it a try let me let me know what you think and yeah thanks for coming