In the past few years, there's been an accelerating swing back toward decentralization.
Users are fed up with the concentration of power, and the prevalence of privacy and free expression violations, and many users are fleeing to smaller, independently operated projects.
Other exciting projects have emerged this year, and public policy is adapting.
It turns out those were just the cracks before the dam burst this year.
This momentum at the start of the year was principally seen in the fediverse, with Mastodon.
Filling a similar niche, but built on the privately developed Authenticated Transfer Protocol, Bluesky also saw rapid growth despite remaining invite-only and not-yet being open to interoperating until next year.
For the decentralized social web to succeed, it must be sustainable and maintain high standards for how users are treated and safeguarded.
In a harrowing example we saw this year, an FBI raid on a Mastodon server admin for unrelated reasons resulted in the seizure of an unencrypted server database.
It's a situation that echoes EFF's founding case over 30 years ago, Steve Jackson Games v. Secret Service, and it underlines the need for small hosts to be prepared to guard against government overreach.
This year has also seen continued work on components of the web that live further down the stack, in the form of protocols and libraries that most people never interact with but which enable the decentralized services that users rely on every day.
The Veilid project was officially released in August, at DEFCON, and the Spritely project has been throwing out impressive news and releases all year long.
As we wrote, we're looking forward to seeing where they lead us in the coming year.
While each service with obligations under the DMA could offer its own bespoke API to satisfy the law's requirements, the better result for both competition and users would be the creation of a common protocol for cross-platform messaging that is open, relatively easy to implement, and, crucially, maintains end-to-end encryption for the protection of end users.
EFF participated in a number of panels focused on the policy implications of decentralization, how to influence policy makers, and the future direction of the decentralized web movement.
Blockchains have been the focus of plenty of legislators and regulators in the past handful of years, but most of the focus has been on the financial uses and implications of the tool.
One of the major issues brought to light by the rise of decentralized social media such as Bluesky and the fediverse this year has been the promises and complications of content moderation in a decentralized space.
Decentralized moderation is certainly not a solved problem, which is why the Atlantic Council created the Task Force for a Trustworthy Future Web.
The Task Force is compiling a final report that will synthesize the feedback and which should be out early next year.
The past year has been a strong one for the decentralization movement.
Throughout the year we have tried to guide newcomers through the differences in decentralized services, inform public policies surrounding these technologies and tools, and help envision where the movement should grow next.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Sun, 31 Dec 2023 14:43:05 +0000