Last week I headed off to Dusseldorf to attend Decentalize Camp, a first time event aiming to kickstart the movement to return the internet to its roots in the early 90s of decentralized and indie(pendent) sites.

The day consisted of a single-tracked morning session focussing less on the technical and more of the ‘why’ of the decentralized web (or more correctly: the ‘indieweb’). The afternoon was then split up into three/four tracks on various subjects related to the area from open source design through to encrypting data in the blockchain.

The morning session covered preserving the internet, building small indie sites (e.g. pinboard), and decentralized beyond software (think satellites and rockets). In the afternoon I saw a talks on decentralized encryption (mainly on git, blockchain, and gossip protocols), bittorrent in the browser/protocols, and gave a talk myself on building realtime applications using XMPP.

Quite frankly I feel that I couldn’t have sat in on each and every one of the sessions and not been transfixed for a single  moment. There was a real buzz about this new conference and a real feeling that this moment is (re)growing and that, despite being hard, there are people out there  that will help make the web a better place.

I’m looking forward to next year’s (hopefully bigger/longer) event already!