Save The Web: Decentralize!

The web was designed to serve humanity, to enable knowledge sharing, for friendship among people.
But data and services centralization by the Tech Giants have completely perverted it. Centralization causes major threats to our societies: mass surveillance, censorship, vote rigging, opponents arrests , advertising tracking.

The situation is such that the founding fathers of the web, including its creator Tim Berners-Lee, multiply the calls to save it.

The solution: decentralize it again, give users control over their data, fight against GAFAM monopolies, rebuild an independent and non-commercial web based on free software.

Developers, journalists, lawyers, artists and activists are organizing to bring out the “Dweb”, the decentralized and distributed web (again). The Dweb is a corpus of standards (usually published by the W3C) such as ActivityPub, JSON-LD, RDF or HTTP as well as tools including Solid, Mastodon, PeerTube or Mobilizon which aim to put the Web at the service of common good.

As web developers, it is our responsibility to build and promote this new web.

The good news is that the PHP ecosystem now has the tools to easily create decentralized web applications based on these standards. During this conference, we will discover why the Dweb is a crucial issue for the future of our societies, how it works technically, and how we implement it with API Platform!

To do so, I just published a new API Platform component: API Platform ActivityPub! This new libraries component allows:

* Build apps supporting ActivityPub in minutes!
* Add ActivityPub support to any existingAPI Platform or Symfony app
* 100% customizable
* Compatible with all API Platform features
* State of the art PHP / API Platform

Transcript

1. Save the Web: Decentralize!
2. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Agenda ❏ The web is dying ❏ What is to be done? ❏ Code is law
3. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web is Dying
4. dunglas.fr - @dunglas What’s the Web?
5. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web of 2020
6. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web, as Designed « The Web is intended to be an Internet-scale distributed hypermedia system […]. The Internet is about interconnecting information networks across multiple organizational boundaries. »
 - Roy T. Fielding,
 Architectural Styles and the Design of Network-based Software Architectures, 2000
7. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web, as Designed decentralized
8. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web of Today centralized
9. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web of Today ❏ GAFAM represent 36% of French Internet time (Mediametrie) ❏ Amazon is the leader in cloud computing (50% market share), in e-commerce (AWS, 50% ms) and live-streaming (Twitch, 75% ms) ❏ Facebook is the leading social network (70% ms) and also owns Instagram, WhatsApp and Giphy ❏ GitHub (Microsoft) is the leading development platform and most free projects depend of it ❏ Google (70% ms) and Apple (30% ms) are the leaders for mobile OS
10. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Technology is Political
11. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Giving Marginalized Groups a Voice « [While creating the web], I realized that the web technology had to be universal to work for any type of computer, but also any language, genre, or culture. » - Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the web
12. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web is Political! « Exchange [on the Internet] occurs without the networks knowing the content of the data, or without any true idea of who in real life the sender of a given bit of data is. This code is neutral about the data, and ignorant about the user. These features of TCP/IP have consequences for the "regulability" of behavior on the Internet. They make regulating behavior difficult. » - Lawrence Lessig, Code Is Law, 2000
13. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web is Political! « [It] is especially important enabling women, the poor, and other marginalized groups to access the web and the opportunities for social and economic empowerment Internet access provides » - Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the web
14. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Centralization is Harmful for Our Communities!
15. dunglas.fr - @dunglas
16. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Threats coming With Centralization Two main kind of threats: ❏ Mass Surveillance ❏ Censorship 
 Two main kind of actors: ❏ Governments ❏ Tech Giants
17. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Centralization and Mass Surveillance
18. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web of Today centralized
21. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Centralization and Censorship
22. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The « Hate » Law (« loi Avia ») ❏ Social networks must remove « clearly illegal » content in less than 24H ❏ Terrorist propaganda and child pornography must be removed in less than 1H ❏ Fine of 200K€ for any content not deleted ❏ No judge involved, no call ❏ Current status: found unconstitutional (on hold)
23. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Example: Video of a Police Brutality Shot by a Journalist in my City
24. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Official Reply from the Police:
25. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Do You See the Problem Now? ❏ The original tweet containing the video isn’t available anymore ❏ With the « hate » law, police could be judge and party, and force the removal of police brutality recordings ❏ A new bill is being discussed (« loi Ciotti »), it could make illegal the publication of police brutality videos
26. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Do You See the Problem Now? This guy is a cop speaking out racism in the police.
27. dunglas.fr - @dunglas This tweet is still available through Tor Browser btw… Tor is a useful highly political piece of software.
28. dunglas.fr - @dunglas And It’s Not Only About Twitter ❏ Facebook blocks the pages of the Kurdish organizations fighting ISIS (because asked to by Turkey) ❏ GitHub (MS) blocks all Iranian users, including famous OSS contributors (NuxtJS Core Team…) ❏ GitHub (MS) banned Tsunami Democràtic's source code (pro Catalan-independence)
29. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web of Today centralized
30. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Code is Law These laws can be easily enforced
 only because
 the web isn’t decentralized anymore!
31. dunglas.fr - @dunglas What Is To Be Done?
32. dunglas.fr - @dunglas So What to Do? ❏ Organize! ❏ Refuse! ❏ Code!
33. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Organize
34. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Organize
35. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Refuse
36. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Refuse ❏ Centralization, mass surveillance, censorship, racist IA, … exist only because people code them. Refuse to do it! ❏ Work in companies where you decide, not your boss, not the stockholders: worker-owned cooperatives
37. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Code Is Law!
38. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Code Is Law « The code regulates. It implements values, or not. It enables freedoms, or disables them. It protects privacy, or promotes monitoring. People choose how the code does these things. People write the code. » - Lawrence Lessig, Code Is Law, 2000
39. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Let’s Code! decentralized centralized
40. dunglas.fr - @dunglas The Web / Linked Data Random GAFAM tech Origin Scientific community, to serve humanity Serve their business Data access « Internet as a global database » Centralized information silos Interoperability Global and built-in Usually none, sometimes partial Best suited for Decentralized and Distributed systems Public APIs (« Open Data ») The World Wide Web Centralized systems Internal APIs
41. dunglas.fr - @dunglas High level protocols (ActivityPub, Solid, Mercure…) HTTP(S) Vocabularies and ontologies (schema.org, ActivityStreams, DublinCore…) RDF (JSON-LD, Turtle) IRI / URI (aka URL) (in the web, everything is identified by an IRI) Use The Web Stack: It IS Decentralized!
42. dunglas.fr - @dunglas A RDF Graph using URIs and Open Vocabularies short for http://schema.org
43. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Example: ActivityPub
44. dunglas.fr - @dunglas ActivityPub ❏ A decentralized social network protocol ❏ A web standard published by the W3C ❏ Built on top of the web stack:
 URI, HTTP, JSON-LD (RDF) ❏ Uses the ActivityStreams open vocabulary (another W3C standard)
45. dunglas.fr - @dunglas
46. dunglas.fr - @dunglas // POST https://social.example/alyssa/outbox { "@context": "https://www.w3.org/ns/activitystreams", "type": "Create", // Not possible with a centralized tech "to": ["https://chatty.example/ben/"], // reference to an external organization "actor": "https://social.example/alyssa/", "object": { "type": "Note", "id": "https://social.example/alyssa/posts/49e2d03d-b53a-4c4c-a95c-94a6abf45a19", "attributedTo": "https://social.example/alyssa/", "to": ["https://chatty.example/ben/"], "content": "Say, did you finish reading that book I lent you?" } }
47. dunglas.fr - @dunglas ActivityPub Apps ❏ : federated social network (Twitter-like) ❏ Mobilizon: federated events system (Meetup-like), by Framasoft ❏ PeerTube: federated video-streaming service (YouTube-like) ❏ NextCloud: federated file sharing service (Dropbox-like) The current state of the decentralized web: the-federation.info
48. dunglas.fr - @dunglas We Need More Apps: Give Us Tools!
49. dunglas.fr - @dunglas API Platform ❏ REST and GraphQL framework written in PHP ❏ Built-in support for JSON-LD and vocabularies ❏ Battery included:
 persistence, filters, authorization, admin UI, React and VueJS app generation, real-time push (Mercure), HTTP/2 Server Push (Vulcain)….
50. dunglas.fr - @dunglas API Platform Schema Generator 3 ❏ Brand new version (alpha) ❏ Import any vocabulary (RDF or OWL):
 schema.org, ActivityStreams, DublinCore… ❏ Generate a full PHP data model, and even a web API ❏ classes, properties (with types), getters and setters, PHPDoc ❏ Doctrine annotations ❏ validation constraints ❏ API Platform annotations! github.com/api-platform/schema-generator #204
51. dunglas.fr - @dunglas API Platform ActivityPub ❏ Published today (alpha) ❏ Build apps supporting ActivityPub in minutes! ❏ Add ActivityPub support to any existing
 API Platform or Symfony app ❏ 100% customizable ❏ Compatible with all API Platform features ❏ State of the art PHP / API Platform github.com/api-platform/activity-pub
52. dunglas.fr - @dunglas Going Further ❏ Solid: decentralized web, true data ownership, privacy ❏ IPFS: distributed web protocol (p2p) ❏ Scuttlebot: p2p log store (distributed) ❏ Introducing the Dweb (Mozilla) ❏ Distributed HTTP (Mark Nottingham) ❏ The web began dying in 2014, here’s how (André Stalz) ❏ The world needs more search engines (cliqz) ❏ The open web is dying (Tony Perez)
53. Don’t Mourn,
 Organize! dunglas.fr