One Path to DWeb

Who Does DWeb Serve?

Great people and values, interesting projects, but conspicuous absence of who exactly it serves.

Technical hobbyists?

The current de facto target audience. Has the technical skill and interest to implement, but not realistic to assume this level of expertise and commitment generally. Cannot go mainstream.

Consumers?

Requires a paradigm that’s more plug-and-play, lower barrier to entry. DWeb has too much investment overhead for consumer or nuclear family to support.

Venture-Backed Startup?

Demonstrated ability to provide and scale reliable and useful services, but they have misaligned incentives.

VC incentives require platform domination to recoup investment. Platform incentives lead to entrenchment, interop frictions, barriers to exit, and general enshittification.

Web3 protocol?

Demonstrated ability to scale, but introduces global dependency that’s difficult to modify, hence the emergence of abstraction layers like L2.

Perhaps asymptotically approach protocols, but shouldn’t start with them.

Who can bear overhead and continuous costs while having user-aligned incentives?

One option: community.

DWeb could be for coliving, coops, libraries. Communities can bear the costs while providing user-aligned incentives.

DWeb could serve community to serve itself.

Carrots and Sticks

Claim: People don’t move because of the sticks, they move because of compelling carrots.

Currently the DWeb conversation is about existing sticks, not about distinct carrots.

Web2 Carrots & Sticks

Carrots:

Economies of scale
Network effects
Simple business model: gated API + advertising

Sticks:

Incentives misaligned with users
- Entrenchment begets Enshittification
Scale means:
- Complex stack
- Massive security surface area and overhead
- Massive reliability costs
Lowest common denominator features
- Balkanization on the basis of community, who need differentiated features:
  - Eg Messaging: Signal, Telegram, Slack, Discord, Email etc
  - Eg Events: Luma, Partiful, Meetup etc

DWeb Carrots & Sticks

Carrots:

Interoperability
- “Unified pane of glass”: re-unify fragmented, balkanized digital self
- Workflows between applications
“Dunbar tech”: rather than hosting for entire world, in theory only need to be reliable + secure for size of community. Trust + size assumption may lower the stakes:
- Simplified stack
- Reduced security surface area
- Lower reliability standard
Privacy:
- Identity
  - Online, identity == key Management, and key management should occur at home
- “Control the means of distribution”
  - Eg artists / content creators controlling distribution of their media
- Protection from AI Model Training
  - Eg
- Privacy-centric applications:
  - Health + diet, eg biometric devices, sensors
Offline + Durable:
- If backed up, all data remains accessible
Embeddedness of Physical + Digital Landscapes:
- Eg NFC chips around the house?
- Eg Self-surveillance as self-awareness?
Network effect counter:
- The network bootstraps it

Sticks:

Cost + knowledge of setting up and hosting
Different stack, infrastructures

The Seed: Single Pane of Glass + Key Management + Archiving

	flowchart TD 
	
	HS[Home API]
	D(Browser Client: Unified User Dashboard)
	HKMS[Home Key Management Service]
	HDB[Home DB]
	HB[Home Backup]
	HSy[Home Sync]
	UD(Application Client: User Device)
	
	MA{Messaging Apps A, B, C...}
	MB{Events Apps X, Y, Z...}
	
	subgraph "Home"
		D
		UD
	end
	
	subgraph "Home Cluster"
		D --> HS 
		UD -->|Device Pulls Updates, Pushes Changes| HS
		UD -->|Device Enrollment on Wifi Connect| HS
		HS -->|OAuth Enrollment Flow| HKMS
		HKMS --> HSy
		HS --> HSy
		HS --> HDB
		HSy --> HDB
		HSy --> HS
		HKMS --> HS
		HDB -->|Periodic Backups| HB 
	end 
	
	subgraph "Internet"
		HS -->|Pull Updates, Push Changes to Target App| MA; HS --> MB;
		HS -->|OAuth Key Enrollment + Rotation| MA; HS --> MB;
	end 
	
	subgraph "Federated Intranet" 
		HS --> HSA{House Clusters: The Muse, Agape, 20mish, etc}
		HS --> HS3{3rd Space Clusters: Frontier Tower, Decentered, Grey Area, House of Web3, etc}
	end

With these three components you get:

Unity
Identity
Durability

This is a sufficient seed to grow from.

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