Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) is proud to announce an award to Spritely Networked Communities Institute (Spritely Institute) to support the creation of decentralized social media. Spritley’s mission is to put people directly in control of their online identities and relationships. This award will further the organization’s efforts on projects ranging from decentralized identity to decentralized social networks to encrypted and portable storage. This technology is open, free, and built to enable a gatekeeper-free path, where users and social content are not tied to a specific server or company.

The rise of centralized social media platforms means that a handful of entities have access and control over an unprecedented amount of personal and professional data. And that data is increasingly valuable, as we’ve seen repeatedly with incidents that have eroded trust, like the events surrounding Cambridge Analytica and Clearview AI.

Spritely Institute is focused on enabling a new social layer for the internet — without gatekeepers. This collaboration between Spritely and FFDW will support infrastructure, user experience, public standardization, and educational materials to create secure decentralized online communities. And this support will also be used to facilitate the development of user-empowered moderation tools and best practices.

“We are building upon decades of research into alternative architectures for making usable secure networked technology. We’re proud to have FFDW as our first sponsor to put our learnings to work for the future of distributed applications and online social experiences,” said Randy Farmer, Executive Director of Spritely Institute. “Our goal is to produce tools that developers can build upon while also delivering social networking protocols that put users’ safety and needs first. Together, we can decentralize the influence of technology on our society, and reduce the toxicity of online interactions through the maintaining of context.”

“We’re excited about Spritely because it gives decentralized networks the opportunity to make good on the promises that legacy social media made and then broke: secure, private, and empowering communications between friends, for the benefit of all,” said Danny O’Brien, Senior Fellow at Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web.

Decentralized standards require a new core architecture that changes the way developers approach programming for the internet. “Object capability security” can provide a foundational model for building programs where secure networked programming becomes the default. This can:

Ensure safe collaboration over a hostile network: Spritely provides a secure Object Capability Network suite, which enables object-to-object communication.
Define new network interface abstractions: These enable peer-to-peer interface instead of client-to-server, with no gatekeepers required, and are composable with existing peer-to-peer technologies such as libp2p and Tor Onion Services.
Support end users: Granular and revocable trust that is persona specific, with local human-meaningful mapping to decentralized identifiers, discoverable names across networks, and credential management.
Enable developers: Spritely is developing a new suite of distributed debugging tools that allow for time-traveling to the state of the system when the error occurred.

This new core architecture is based on secure capability semantics on decentralized networks — and this approach is not the current prevalent programming paradigm, so end-user and developer-focused educational materials must cover the ground from fundamentals up through best practices.

“We’re proud to support Spritely Institute with this award,” said FFDW Board Chair Marta Belcher. “We experience so much of our daily lives through just a handful of corporations, and have no choice but to trust those corporations not to misuse troves of data about us. At FFDW, we believe that decentralized technologies can put people in control of their own data and protect user privacy and security.”

Learn more about Spritely Institute here.