How can we build a more safe, secure, and prosocial internet?

Most of us have at least a vague sense that something's off with the internet as we know it. The social media apps and platforms we spend a lot of time on are owned by a handful of companies whose business model involves harvesting our attention and parasitizing our emotional energy so as to extract lots of our data so that it can then be sold to advertisers. Under such regimes, we do not control our digital identities, our social graphs, or our personal content. Instead, in effect we rent them, and the landlord can change the terms or evict us at anytime. The internet started with lofty ideals in the so-called "Web1" era of the 1990s, but those days are long gone and the Internet has become, in a term coined by Cory Doctorow, enshittified.

This is certainly lamentable, but none of this was inevitable and it doesn't have to stay this way. What we have is the result of specific choices about how the web got built initially, how it scaled, and big business outstripped the reach of the regulatory bodies who were tasked with making the internet useful for everyone.
What ended up happening in the 2000s was the emergence of "Web2": the centralized, platform-dominated Internet that is currently dominant. But there is a whole world of emergent and decentralized tech work often referred to as "Web3" (though that term carries a lot of baggage) that is aiming to build alternatives that would be better for people, communities, and for the planet. Without a doubt, some of what is happening in this scene is hype and speculation, but quite a lot of it is serious: protocols for decentralized identity, peer-to-peer infrastructure, federated social networks, data you actually own. The problem is that this space is sprawling, jargon-heavy, and almost impossible to navigate unless you already live in it.

That's the gap Brandon has been working on with a project called OpenHaven. This is basically a taxonomy-driven directory and navigator for the decentralized protocol ecosystem, and a prototype can be found at [OpenHaven.net](https://openhaven.net) The idea is to make this whole landscape legible: what exists, what it does, how the pieces relate. Brandon will start this event with a short overview of how we got the internet we have, what the decentralization-oriented people and organizations are actually trying to do about it, and where OpenHaven fits in.

Here are a few things Brandon wants us consider during this conversation:

• Is centralization actually the right frame for what's wrong and is decentralization the solution we are looking for, or does this framing smuggle in assumptions we should question? What are we really trying to fix?
• Admittedly, the current internet is genuinely convenient for many people. What would we end up having to give up to get something better, and would the trade worth it?
• "Prosocial" is doing a lot of work in the title. What would an internet that actively makes us better citizens and neighbors even look like? Who gets to decide?

Come with curiosity and your own gripes about the internet. No technical expertise is required to join this discussion.

(description generated with AI assistance and significant human editing)