I was born the same year that Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web, has made available to the world's first Web browser history.

It was called WorldWideWeb - later renamed Nexus - and not only allowed to navigate through web pages, but even to modify them and create new ones was a browser but also an editing program.
In the idea of Tim Berners-Lee, the web was then an interactive medium through which anyone could actively take, edit and adjust to your liking content.
It's been 27 years and the web has changed completely, confined in walled gardens and gigantic server farms - the so-called cloud - which are in the hands of a few, giant technology companies.
Our post end up in message boards of Facebook and Twitter, subjugated by the Terms of Service and Community standards that these American companies establish.
The photos and videos end up on platforms like Instagram, YouTube and Snapchat, completely isolated digital atolls from one another.
"You can make your beautiful walled garden you want, but at the end of the jungle outside will always be much more fascinating."
To counter the new dynamics of power generated by this centralization of the Internet, several projects are born that seek to produce a centrifugal force to redistribute the control of the web and put it back in the hands of users.
The movement for decentralization is finally ushering online, trying to fulfill that dream cyberpunk origin - captained by the same Tim Berners-Lee at MIT is developing the Solid project in an effort to provide a new control of their personal data.
For this reason, therefore, I decided to venture into the jungle and enter the world of decentralized web to see what the future holds.
The first close encounter occurred in this jungle with what looks like a direct descendant of the browser created by Tim Berners-Lee: Beaker.
The nature of this browser is revealed immediately looking at the project website: "The web should be a creative tool for everyone."
Beaker is available for all operating systems - MacOS, Windows and Linux - and I immediately installed smoothly version for my test operating system, Ubuntu.
The message that greets you when you first start already marks a clear difference with the classic web as we know it:
The website live on your computer.
No need to rent a remote server, your computer is all you need to set up a website.
Just specify the location to save the site's files and are ready to go.
Beaker, unlike the classic web that uses the HTTP protocol - or the more secure HTTPS - to communicate between computers and servers, use the new peer-to-peer (P2P) protocol called Dat.
This allows you to synchronize files and send data over a distributed network.
When you visit the decentralized sites that use the Dat protocol, each user connects directly with the site owner's computer and provides their computers to further strengthen and decentralize the files that make up the web page - using the same seeding process used in case of torrent files and then downloading files and ricondividendoli network.
You can decide how to contribute, if performing seeding only while you are connected to the site, or for a day, a week, a month or forever.
More users contribute with your computer to copying and distribution of content on a site and that site will be resistant to any kind of censorship.
This is one of the weaknesses of the current centralized web: blocking a site simply requires locate the server on which it is located and ask the manager to turn it off or to telephone operators to block access to certain IP address of the server.
In the case of a site which contribute 50 users you will need to block all those computers, dramatically increasing resistance against censorship.
Beaker also directly provides the ability to dissect the websites that you visit, offering access to all files and folders that make up a page and allowing you to copy and modify them to create their own version of the website.
I could not resist and I immediately created the mirror of my personal website, uploaded the files in the folder that I selected startup Beaker and I found myself facing an exact copy of the site, but accessible through the Dat protocol.
Every change made to that folder is reflected in the Workspace section, where an interface similar to that of Github reports the files updated and modified.
You can check out the changes made to the files before publishing the updated version of the site.
A private key encryption confirms the authenticity of the changes I've made right away, and the site is updated.
With the same cryptographic system you can share files using the link private and secure - there's a shared my image but you need to download it Beaker: dat: // 3e625bc8c3660154229dd9a150aa470e8fe5ad5ff251d192ff1d16574a106690 /
As for my site, however, it has not yet been visited - or downloaded - from anyone.
In decentralized web again, as we have seen for Dat protocol, encryption is the cornerstone of the entire infrastructure.
One of the most fascinating projects from this point of view is certainly Scuttlebutt, a sort of social network where you can talk freely about all the issues dear to the cyberpunk world without fear of ending up crushed in Facebook surveillance - or as it is described on the website " a decentralized and secure platform for gossip. "
Scuttlebutt is a network protocol that allows you to manage your profile and personal information as you see fit.
There are several applications that let you interact with the data generated in this way, in my tests I used the Patchwork client.
Load bars everywhere.
Using Scuttlebutt, I realized that the loading bar is one of the symbols that distinguish the experience in web decentralized since the files we downloaded must be updated whenever the latest version - and in the case of a social network like we Scuttlebutt they are often new post.
The software, in fact, download on our computer bulletin boards of all the friends to whom we are connected, in this way, if someone deletes the profile of a friend, you'll still an updated version of its online content posted.
Upon entering, however, our board is deserted, to populate it, we have two ways: directly follow the people we know looking for their contact, or even subscribe to so-called pubs.
The operation of the latter is quite clear: the pubs are the digital equivalent of the bars and pubs where we meet people when we're away from our keyboards, and thus allow us to identify new users.
I sailed a bit 'in section # new-people to make me a bit' the idea of who attends the Scuttlebutt universe - renamed by scuttleverse users.
The community that revolves around Scuttlebutt is technologically skilled, fascinated by the web decentralized and its potential - including criptovalute - but also interested in the issues on the border of public discussion, as the nomadic life and off-the-grid.
I looked out the #solarpunk channels, #feminism, #music, #bitcoin, #conceptart and even #italy, hoping to find some fellow active - unfortunately the latest contents had been published a year ago and got no answer.
I still try this Italian user.
Mox601, if you read me knock once.
really it seems to be in an unexplored area of the web in which all have a desire to meet new people, share ideas and talk about the evolution of the Internet.
There are several channels dedicated just to the development and management of Scutlebutt protocol in which they discuss the necessary steps to ensure the dissemination of this new approach to the web.
The data that are downloaded to their friends that follow are also accessible online and can also be shared through Bluetooth or mesh networks - such as the Italian community Ninux or guifi.net present in Spain.
The decentralized web seems to offer solid guarantees against censorship and the internet network blocks, provide a new control over their data and, above all, in fact it seems the world imagined by the cyberpunk culture.
And the essential ingredients for this new web are encryption and peer-to-peer technology.
A Scuttlebutt user summed up perfectly in his post the transformation we are experiencing "the #cyberspazio had been built in a historical context in which there were few computing devices available on the planet; the #cryptospazio is built into the global context of ubiquitous computing power: the criptospazio is the democratization of cyberpunk superpowers of Web 2.0. "
In the information page of the conceived by Tim Berners-Lee browser, read "hypermedia browser-editor, an exercise in global information dissemination." In the jungle of decentralized web, the web dreamed up by Berners-Lee is still within reach of a click and server farms no longer serve us: we have our computers.

From Vice