Decentralized Web: Overview

Goal:

to replace proprietary, Big Tech platforms (Facebook, Twitter, eBay, LinkedIn, Google search, etc) with tools for the creation of decentralized, open source, privacy-enhancing platforms

The fact that these legacy platforms still exist and wield the considerable influence that they do is how we know we haven't succeeded yet.

Why?

surveillance capitalism

disinformation

fake user accounts

ratings farms

censorship and deplatforming

poisoned public discourse

the model of monetization through advertising trains us to abandon our agency over our own attention and is soul-crushing

we don't control our data

Biggest Hurdle: Walled Gardens

No two platforms (whether open-source or proprietary) speak the same language or follow the same standards. They organize and format data in different ways. And in a decentralized world, there is no central authority (nor should there be!) to enforce universal standards.

Solution: the Principle of Loki

For any piece of data, there must always be a simple, straightforward, formalized and well defined method to connect that data to a record of its format.

Seems too simple, right? It's not!

Implementation by way of two companion apps:

the Concept Graph: organization of data into "concepts" using the Principle of Loki

the Grapevine: a web of trust, designed to pair with the Concept Graph

designed for ordinary users, not just developers; intuitive and user-friendly

When used together, the Concept Graph is a way to ask questions and the Grapevine is a way to answer them.

Loose Consensus

shared standards established by using the Concept Graph and the Grapevine together to answer questions regarding how to format data

applies to questions that may be detailed and tedious, with a large solution space of perfectly valid answers, but which have no clear Schelling point in the absence of pre-established consensus; most people don't care about the answers (not politically charged or otherwise controversial) -- they simply want some sort of community-wide consensus to exist, so they can communicate!

the solution to the problem of Walled Gardens!

Phase 1: Validation

demonstration of the ability of the Concept Graph and the Grapevine to generate Loose Consensus

target users: people who maintain specifications of W3C Standards, especially ones that are relevant to Web of Trust (Verifiable Credentials, JSON-Linked Data, DIDs, etc)

Phase 2: Hybrid Platforms

a bridge to make it easy for the average internet user to transition from the old world to the new, from proprietary platforms to the decentralized web

addendum: Neuroscience

The brain, like the decentralized web, is a decentralized system, in the sense that no single neuron, cortical column, region, or network has authority over the others (as evidenced, for example, by split-brian or other types of disconnection syndromes). I conjecture the problem of Walled Gardens may apply to the brain just as it does to the decentralized web, and that the Principle of Loki / Loki Pathways may already exist as an organizing principle for information in the cortex.

If true, it indicates that the Principle of Loki is a powerful one, with far-reaching consequences. This would also explain how and why the operations of the Concept Graph and the Grapevine are so remarkably intuitive and user-friendly.

* Loki = "LOcalization of Keys" where "key" is an acknowledgement of the fact that knowledge of the format for any given file or piece of information is like a "key" to the file