Thread by @helioscomm

🧵 Reflections on #DWebCamp #DWebCamp2022

DWeb camp is an interesting thing. It's more like a festival than a conference. I don't know if the goal is for participants to build things or to connect and recharge, but I don't see why it can't be both.

For me, it was a great chance to simply be with other DWeb folks and know that we're not alone in trying to build digital 'tools for conviviality', as #IvanIllich says -- tools that help us be more human, rediscover our agency, support each other. This work often feels lonely.

It wasn't just about knowing that we have allies. It was about meeting those allies, being in the same space, chatting over breakfast, stargazing together, even attending a wedding between two participants! It was about coupling our heady #DWeb world with the realm of the heart.

This beautiful culture is partly due to @whanamura 's careful gardening of the @GETDWeb culture -- gathering people around her who share the vision of a people-first internet. The camp felt so nourishing -- no tech bro BS, kids and music everywhere, focus on the whole person.

That said, a lot of productive stuff happened. Jill and @LeanneUssher of hrea.io gave a great workshop on ValueFlows -- a vocabulary for creating economic relationships. hREA is ValueFlows as a Holochain app and, demo gremlins aside, it felt like deep work.

The other thing out in full force was 'neighbourhood' social networks -- exemplified by demos from @Neighbour_hoods and github.com/lightningrodla…. Cool things going on there. Instead of starting with multiple apps and creating groups in each of them to do our work, we start with...

the group and give it a bunch of tools so it can do its work. Designed well, these tools can interconnect with each other like G Suite does.

But the other cool thing is the 'agent perspective': switch the axis and you reorient to an app-oriented view where you can see your...

stuff across all groups you participate in. Both forms of aggregation -- group level and tool level -- help you make sense of your world in different but complementary ways.

One thing that really excited me was that the demos for hREA, We, and Neighbourhoods all attracted people outside of our little Holochain bubble. Lots of interest from #SecureScuttlebutt folks, which for me carries the hope that bridges are being built!

Speaking of hope, there were a lot of people from @DigiDem, and I got to chat with one of them. Here's a story: back in '19 and '20 I was disillusioned with my participation in the DWeb. Did any of this matter? Did it have any power to change our fortunes for the better?

Would anything come of this work or was this wasted energy better spent on on-the-ground projects?

Then I learned about @DigiDem 's Mapeo project, built on @HypercoreProto , helping indigenous groups to assert sovereignty by mapping territorial infringements from multinationals.

Such a powerful, beautiful use case, using tech to threaten the hegemonic power of mining/logging companies in the Amazon basin.

I realised -- this is a use case that #CloudComputing can't touch! No internet out there in the rainforest. Only a P2P protocol could work.

I also met Ben Tairea from ahau.io who is doing equally inspiring things in NZ using Scuttlebutt. Building tools to reclaim cultural identity among Māori folks. Why are they using P2P? Because it lets people own their own data, the stories they're collecting.

These stories cemented my conviction that the #DWeb matters. #P2PComputing matters. Modelling your digital tech around personal and collective sovereignty, cooperation, and resilience matters.

Here's to the decentralised web! It is an honour to be counted among your numbers. Stay strong, folks, and keep building beautiful things!

@whimful do you have a Twitter handle for Ben? Would love to ping him

I love when the little kid screams and the cellist smiles -- the scream was her daughter

tagging @jburrows in this thread after the fact because I couldn't find her Twitter handle when I first posted it 😳