Abstract
Let's take back the internet! Learn about Spritely's work to re-decentralize the net with new foundational technologies that put users in control.
Today's internet is fragile and increasingly dependent on large, centralized web services. The software industry is concerned with building things that scale up, but these services ultimately serve not the users but corporate gatekeepers. To regain agency of our computing and create more resilient networks, decentralization offers a solution. By scaling down and scaling wide, we can build robust applications for healthier online communities.
Decentralization comes with a catch, however. Removing centralization inherently adds architectural complexity. Unfortunately, there are no mainstream frameworks available to handle all of the hard stuff. There's a steep barrier to entry and no clear onboarding path. Will decentralized technology ever have its Ruby on Rails moment? The Spritely Institute is working on it! Spritely is a nonprofit that is building the next generation of decentralized networking technology, where resilient, peer-to-peer, secure applications isn't the special case for mega-geniuses... it's the default thing you get using Spritely's tech! In this talk, Christine and David will cover topics such as the actor model and object capability security, and describe a tech stack that makes secure, decentralized programming the default way to build.
Speaker
Christine Lemmer-Webber
Executive Director @Spritely Institute, Co-Author of ActivityPub
Christine Lemmer-Webber is best known as a co-author of ActivityPub, the protocol that underlies federated social media applications such as Mastodon. As Executive Director at the Spritely Institute, a nonprofit research and development organization, she is working on making secure, distributed programming easier so developers can build decentralized and user-empowering networked systems.
Speaker
David Thompson
CTO @Spritely Institute,
David is the CTO at the Spritely Institute, a US-based nonprofit working on decentralized networking technology for safe collaboration. At Spritely, he works on Goblins, a capability-secure distributed programming environment, and Hoot, a Scheme to WebAssembly compiler and general-purpose WebAssembly toolchain. He is a longtime contributor to the Guile and Guix projects and the author of software such as Haunt, a purely functional static site generator.
