DWeb Camp Cascadia 2025: Canada’s First Regional Decentralized Web Camp in the Pacific Northwest

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Banner for DWeb Camp Cascadia reads "Salt Spring Island August 8-10" over a blurry image of the venue, Farmers Institute

We’re thrilled to see how much our hope for DWeb to decentralize globally has been fulfilled this year. In our blog announcing the Core team’s decision to take a hiatus from holding DWeb Camp in California, our Senior Organizer Wendy Hanamura wrote:

[It] is time to put our energy into truly decentralizing DWeb. We want to nurture this movement in a way that empowers nodes around the world, especially those outside of the United States. We want to focus our energies in 2025 on helping local networks build capacity and grow. 

In 2025, we held gatherings in Taipei and Berlin before a summer jam-packed with DWeb happenings: DWeb was at What Hackers Yearn in the Netherlands, HOPE_16 in New York, along with the intensive, hands-on week of p2p and local-first protocol learning at the DWeb Seminar SF & Weekend (stay tuned for more writing to come from that).

And of course, DWeb Camp Cascadia, organized by the stellar folks of the DWeb YVR Node. By the spring, we had been hearing murmurs of their planning the event. It all came together when they decided to hold it early August on beautiful Salt Spring Island, a 45-minute drive and 90-minute ferry ride from Vancouver. This was only the second camp outside of California since DWeb+Coolab Camp Brazil in 2023. 

An image of a sunset from inside a tent, showing a blue cloudy sky over a field scattered with over a dozen other tents.
View from inside a tent at DWeb Camp Cascadia

For anyone who was there in 2019 at DWeb Camp at the Mushroom Farm — it felt so much like our first DWeb. It was held at the Farmers’ Institute, which is regularly used for an annual farmer’s fair for the whole island. About 60 participants in total attended throughout the weekend. An informal polling (raised hands during the opening) showed that about 40% of attendees traveled from the US, with the remaining 60% from Canada — several of whom live on Salt Spring Island itself. It spoke volumes that the local attendees really enjoyed the event while having various interests: from regenerative agriculture and responsible land stewardship to music and web development.

The event kicked off on Friday evening with remarks from Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May, whose federal electoral district spans across seven islands, including Salt Spring Island. As leader of Canada’s Green Party, May’s team is working to shape Canada’s upcoming AI legislation. She first gave an acknowledgement of the ancient indigenous history of where we were and its colonization. Then she called attention to Big Tech’s ongoing global dominance, and the recent occurrence of the democratically decided Digital Services Tax having been scrapped by the Canadian Prime Minister over tariff negotiations with the U.S. Following her speech, I (mai), gave a history of the DWeb events and shared the DWeb Principles, with campers getting up to read each of the five principles. Campers then got into small groups to discuss them, with a few of them coming up to share their own reflections.

An image of an audience of about 40 people sitting on benches outside, watching Member of Parliament Elizabeth May speaking on stage.
Campers watching Member of Parliament, Elizabeth May, speak at the Opening Session

Saturday and Sunday were packed with talks, discussions, and workshops. Unlike the main DWeb Camp where we have many concurrent tracks, mornings were a single track of programming followed by afternoons with three parallel unconference sessions. DWeb Camp Cascadia’s cornerstone themes were decentralization, democracy, open social networks, regenerative agriculture, and included community talks by local technologists living in and around Salt Spring Island.

Brooklyn Zelenka of Ink & Switch and spec editor for the UCAN distributed RPC and auth system, gave an excellent talk Saturday morning introducing local-first technologies and the affordances of networks that prioritize local, people-centric connectivity. Brooklyn described how big data “cloud” services centralize infrastructure in a way that always requires connectivity (such as when you can no longer edit a Google document when you lose internet access). Offering a powerful metaphor, Brooklyn suggested most services today rely on networks that act more like a military aircraft carrier, when many personal or local services could act more like a bike — nimble, resilient, and scaled down to meet the unique needs of individuals. You can check out the recording of the August DWeb Virtual meetup where she gave the same presentation. 

Image of Brooklyn Zelenka, standing on the opposite side of the room speaking to a large room of about 40 people sitting down.
Brooklyn Zelenka giving a talk on local-first networks

There was a cornerstone session for the Open Social Web, led by Nigini Oliviera (DWeb Seattle Node lead) and featured Ian Davis, Matthew Lorentz and Mike Waggooner, each discussing their work with ATProtocol, ActivityPub, and Nostr. They discussed the differences between social media protocols and how each of them hold potential for new apps to be built on them.

Jacob Sayles of Cascadia Collaborative Design gave a workshop on Meshtastic radios. All over the world there has been a growing popularity of LoRa (Long-Range) devices, particularly with the release of Meshtastic software that is increasingly making it easier for anyone to send short, SMS/text-length messages to those nearby. It’s completely decentralized in that it requires no dedicated router and enables messages to hop from device-to-device to go to its intended recipient(s). In practical terms, it’s currently most useful for emergency situations and other situations as an alternative to mobile and internet connectivity. While messages are encrypted, there are still privacy issues with the software/hardware that make it less useful for privacy-sensitive uses. 

An image of a butcher paper poster covered with marker writing and post-its for an unconference schedule.
Poster with unconference sessions scheduled on Sunday, the last day of Camp

Some of the unconference sessions included:

  • What would a decentralized iNaturalist look like?
  • Bioregional learning and digital tech
  • Robotics without data centers
  • AI safety and how to dwebbify AI
  • Conscious use of AI by appreciating artisanship
  • Clean tech + climate tech
  • “Privacy party” — sponsoring network effects
  • Fractal cells + self-organizing
  • How to contain sociopaths
  • Practical local-first
  • Pretzel and quark cheese making
  • Gymnastics + parkour

In addition to these sessions, what made the gathering feel like a DWeb Camp were the other activities throughout the weekend: yoga in the mornings, visits to local regenerative farms, and a hike through redwoods to swim in the ocean.

Photos of a hike through redwoods in Burgoyne Bay

On the first night there was an impromptu karaoke session backed by acoustic guitar played by Paul d’Aoust and cajon played by Nigini Oliviera. On Saturday night we had a dance party and on Sunday night — as may now be tradition — an open mic that featured nine campers showing off their music and comedy.

Image of a group of 7 seven standing on a stage around a table singing. The wall above them has a big banner of musical notes.
Campers singing karaoke along on the first night

What I often hear from campers year-to-year is that DWeb is exactly the kind of community they were looking for. People who are deeply engaged with what it means to design and build values-based technologies, who are also themselves people who clearly understand what it means to listen and take care of each other. Along with our curiosity and passion for how we can build better networks, campers are able to integrate that focus with how we are as people — how we want to be better in our communities and the lands we live on. At a time when mainstream technologies seem intent on stripping away our humanity with their use, cultivating these spaces not only feels critical, it’s exhilarating. 

On the ferry ride back from Salt Spring Island, members of the DWeb YVR Node were already starting to discuss plans to organize it again for next year with more campers. As someone who’s been involved in DWeb Camp from the beginning, I will say that seeing this event grow feels incredibly affirming: that there’s a need and desire to bring together in-person those ready and able to build  better digital networks during these turbulent times. 

Photo of a farm looking space with a field in the background, the sky is blue and orange with a sunset.
Sunset over the Farmers Institute, the venue for DWeb Camp Cascadia on Salt Spring Island, Canada

~

This blog post has been written by mai ishikawa sutton, Senior Organizer of DWeb and member of the DWeb Core Team. Learn more about DWeb at: https://getdweb.net/

Local Voices, Lasting Impact: Digitizing a Community Magazine in Hancock County, Mississippi

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The following guest post from Ash Parker, Collections & Digital Services Librarian at the Hancock County Library System in Mississippi, is part of a series written by members of Internet Archive’s Community Webs program. Community Webs advances the capacity of community-focused memory organizations to build web and digital archives documenting local histories.

Hancock County Library System is located on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi and serves a population of around 47,000. Our community and stakeholders are dedicated to preserving the history of Hancock County and the coast—and they told us that this was a priority during strategic planning. This community feedback led the library to join the Community Webs program in the spring of 2023. With support from the program, we began preserving websites related to the area’s culture, civic associations, local government, and more.

In late 2024, staff arrived to discover a devastating leak in our main branch and system headquarters. Our Mississippi/Louisiana Special Collection was particularly affected, and we rushed to fan and dry hundreds of books. As we assessed the damage, it was clear that the pamphlets, books, and newsletters in the collection contained stories vital to this community’s history. We saw the importance of starting a digitization initiative aimed at increasing access to these unique local history resources. We began utilizing the Vault digital preservation service and providing access to our digitized collections through Internet Archive. 

OPPORTUNITY TO DIGITIZE THE MISSISSIPPI STAR

When the opportunity arose to participate in the Increasing Access to Diverse Public Library Local History Collections project, a Community Webs digitization initiative supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the timing could not have been better. HCLS had the motivation to begin digitizing our collections and the existing relationship with Community Webs and the Internet Archive was ideal.  

But what items to select for digitization?  Enter the Mississippi Star.

The Mississippi Star Magazine, 1996-1999 is now available through archive.org

The recent damage assessment of our Mississippi collection led me to remember a small, booklet-style magazine featuring local people, events, and topics of interest—created for and by the Mississippi Coast African American community. Recognizing the editor, Maurice Singleton, Jr., as a regular library patron, I was able to get enthusiastic permission for the Internet Archive to digitize and share 40 issues of the Mississippi Star.

This publication ran from August 1996 to the end of 2000. The five principles guiding the Star—”family, health, education, business, and culture”—provided the Black community with not just visibility, but the positive representation sorely missing in other local publications. In the first issue published in 1996, editor Maurice Singleton wrote, “Media is often referred to as a ‘mirror’ of our society. If this is the case, very little of what I read in the newspapers or watch on the evening news represents me, my friends, the people with whom I worship or the people with whom I exchange waves over the course of a day.” During its four-year run, the Mississippi Star gave readers a platform to see themselves and their community excelling and achieving together.

Maurice Singleton, Jr., publisher of the Mississippi Star, in 1996 and 2025

The Mississippi Star was digitized at the Internet Archive’s scanning center in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Once the digitization process was complete, Hancock County residents gained easy, online access to a collection that likely few realized was available at their library. Outside Hancock County and Mississippi, researchers and the public interested in a variety of topics—Mississippi history, the Civil Rights Movement and its impact, community-centered media, and more—have access via the World Wide Web to quality scans and full-text search. HCLS hopes to track down the missing issues to be able to provide the full run of this publication in the future.

SPIN-OFF PROJECTS: ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW AND PUBLIC PROGRAM

HCLS partnered with Maurice Singleton on related projects, including an oral history interview in April. Once complete, the audio recording and transcript will join this digital collection and provide additional context and nuance. We also held a public program in May to spotlight and celebrate the collection. Maurice spoke to the community about his memories of publishing the Mississippi Star—the inspiration, influences, and community impact—highlighting some of the more memorable articles. Attendees had a chance to see the physical issues held by the library and browse the digital collection on a touchscreen kiosk. The storytelling and remembrances during the program demonstrated the impact of community-centered archiving. Thirty years later, photographs of fellow community members captured interest and attention as people laughed and connected. Maurice came alive as he told his story and engaged with questions from the audience. As the program closed, the community came together to reflect on the importance of preserving community history. Maurice recalled a gentleman who had gently urged him to “bring back the Star” over the years since he’d stopped publication. This project had brought the Mississippi Star back for Maurice, for the community, and beyond.  

Ash Parker and Maurice Singleton, Jr. discussed the library’s digital collections and celebrated the addition of the Mississippi Star at an event at the Bay St. Louis Library on May 30, 2025.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE MISSISSIPPI STAR: MEMORABLE ISSUES

The Mississippi Star magazine provided a monthly glimpse into the Black community of the Mississippi Coast and the State in the late 1990s. The publication included local news, features, interviews, book reviews, advertising from local businesses, and letters from readers—all presenting a positive view of the Black community and holding to the values of family, health, education, business, and culture. Maurice shared that readers sometimes referred to the magazine as the Mississippi Jet, referencing one of the few publications with positive Black representation at the time (the other memorable example being Ebony).  

Interview with the Family of Slain Civil Rights Leader Vernon Dahmer, Sr.

During its run, Maurice highlighted interviews in 1998 with the family of civil rights leader Vernon Dahmer, Sr. as most memorable and important. Dahmer was murdered in 1966 on orders of the Ku Klux Klan after gaining attention for helping Black Mississippians vote. At the time of the first interview in February 1998, stalled justice was being re-energized. Billy Roy Pitts, who was convicted but had not served a life sentence, turned himself in to state officials and later was a key witness for the prosecution of the KKK leader who ordered the murder.

  

“Vernon Dahmer, Sr.: A Man Remembered, A Tragedy Recalled” appeared in the February 1998 Mississippi Star

In a follow-up interview in September 1998, Maurice spoke with the family after the August conviction and sentencing of the man responsible for the murder of Vernon Dahmer, Sr. thirty-two years after the event.  Reflecting on the recent trial and what was different from 1966, Mrs. Ellie Dahmer, Vernon Dahmer, Sr.’s widow said, “The climate in Mississippi has changed. People would tolerate what Sam Bowers did in the 1960s. I don’t think he had as many people to sympathize with him as he did then.”  

The timely importance of this moment in South Mississippi history was reinforced by the community response. In the March 1998 issue, a reader wrote, “A few words about this heart wrenching story about the plight of Mr. Dahmer and his family. In my opinion this man was truly committed, with great courage and no compromise. I will always remember the Dahmer family when I think of the Kings, Evers and Rosa Parks.”

Interview with and Tribute to Dr. Gilbert Mason

Maurice also interviewed civil rights leader Dr. Gilbert Mason of Biloxi. Widely known for leading the ‘Wade In’ protests in response to segregated beaches on the Mississippi Coast in the 1950s and 1960s, Dr. Mason was a driving force for the Black community on the Coast and a long-serving president of Biloxi’s NAACP. Remembering the protests, Dr. Mason said, “A small group of us had gone to the beach in 1959 and had been threatened that if we didn’t leave the beach they would remove us. That happened before the sit ins in Greensboro. That was one of the first protest acts we knew of. The youth branch of the NAACP had done sit ins, but this was one of the first in the Deep South.”

Cover and excerpt of the Mississippi Star September 1999 issue which included a tribute to Dr. Gilbert Mason ahead of the publication of a memoir slated for August 2000.

The Mississippi Star was published decades after the Civil Rights Movement and the key figures and actions from that point in history continued to impact the Black community in South Mississippi in the late 1990s. Feature articles and photographs from community events documented the importance of those historical leaders even as new leaders in the community emerged. Now, nearly thirty years later, this publication speaks to the progress and stories of Mississippi. Evidence of local happenings, successes, remembrances, public announcements, and day-to-day life are now available for locals and researchers from around the globe to access thanks to support from Community Webs and Internet Archive.

Browse the Mississippi Star Magazine collection on archive.org.

The Adjacent Possible in the Decentralized Web

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Applied Cryptographer, Ying Tong Lai, presents her unconference topic at DWeb Weekend

As I understand it, the concept of the “adjacent possible” describes changes just within reach given the current state of a system’s knowledge, resources, and components. It’s a “shadow future” of the possibilities on the edge of the present. The adjacent possible asks: what can you learn from existing building blocks to create new ones?

That is, at heart, what the DWeb Seminar set out to do.

The recipe for DWeb Seminar

THE EXPERIMENT: Over the course of three days and nights, in a house in the Presidio of San Francisco, can you take 10 core peer-to-peer (P2P) developers, 2 research directors, 1 editor, and 3 stewards, mix them up, expose them to provocative prompts, and see if some breakthroughs in understanding and technical consensus are possible?

THE PRECEDENT: The inspiration and format of the DWeb Seminar comes directly from Professor Christian Tschudin’s P2P Basel, the annual workshop he runs at the University of Basel for offline-first, P2P researchers and protocol builders in Europe. Over the course of five P2P Basel annual gatherings, Christian and his associate research director, Erick Lavoie, have honed the recipe: 10 participants (not more), cooking and doing dishes together (a key lubricant), in a smallish space (no escape!), for three days (it’s exhausting!). 
At DWeb Camp 2024, I heard from DWeb Fellow Andreas Dzialocha (P2Panda) that this three-day workshop in Basel had been a turbo-charging event for his work. To be in a place where everyone understands intimately what a CRDT (Conflict-free Replicated Data Type) is, has a basic grasp of cryptography — that allows the participants to move fast and deep very quickly. I wondered: could we replicate what the folks in Europe were doing in the Americas?

THE RAMP UP: In August 2024, on the balcony of the Hackers Hall at Camp Navarro, I approached Christian Tschudin with an idea: would he work with me to create a DWeb version of his workshop, across many DWeb projects and specialties? I started to introduce him to DWeb protocol builders and he attended their technical talks to begin understanding developers’ focus areas in the DWeb ecosystem. We sought to have representatives from every part of the tech stack, and luckily, at DWeb Camp 2024 you can find many accomplished protocol builders just chatting around the campfire.

The Japanese have a core concept called nemawashi – preparing the roots – which is critical to any venture’s success. It’s a time of informal listening, building relationships, coming to a shared vision before any formal announcement is made. Late 2024, Christian and I started our nemawashi. We needed to create a budget, raise the money, so eventually we could hire an Associate Research Director, an editor for an eventual publication, and stewards for the process.  I wanted to add on a DWeb Weekend, where the public could contribute ideas and learn from our participants.

Fortunately, the Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, was enthusiastic about sponsoring the event from the get-go. He has always been about building working code, testing it in the wild, making tools that are useful for people. So a week-long event anchored at the Internet Archive, dedicated to deepening our understanding of what remains to be built – that resonated with his call long ago to create a “third path” for developers who want to use technology to help humanity. Brewster and his wife Mary Austin even allowed 16 of us to use every nook and cranny of their house, to camp in their backyard, cook in their kitchen, and debate around their dining table long into the night.

The recipe for a successful seminar called for meals prepared together at Brewster & Mary’s house

THE EXECUTION:  We decided to title the DWeb Seminar “Current Science & Grand Challenges” to map the current and future DWeb landscapes, and from August 13-15, 2025, we gathered some of the top researchers and builders in the Americas. There were experts in object capabilities (David Thompson/Spritely Institute) and applied cryptography (Ying Tong Lai.) Our editor, Dmitri Zagidulin brought with him deep knowledge of data types and decentralized identity (DID) standards. Some were founders of venture-backed startups (Brendan O’Brien/iroh) or worked for well-funded P2P companies (Rae McKelvey/Ditto).  Matthew Weidner studied CRDTs for his PhD (now on hold.) Others worked on grants and contracts, in small teams or in universities. Many were experts in the data layer of the stack, able to debate the ideal decentralized stack like few others in the world could. We sought a group with a shared vocabulary, diverse specialties, collaborative temperaments, and a willingness to listen to others. 

DWeb Seminar 2025 Participants – Missing: Rae McKelvey
The “mantras” of collaborative exploration can be found at https://dwebseminar.org/seminar/

THE PHILOSOPHY: Whenever you gather a small group of highly knowledgeable people, some intimidation and fear can creep in. Many confessed later that they harbored feelings of “impostor syndrome,” and feared that they wouldn’t be able to keep up or be understood.  But anticipating this, our research directors, Christian Tschudin and Andreas “adz” Dzialocha created a set of “mantras.” 

When I asked our organizing team what they hoped to create, they replied, “A safe space,” “a house with good food, and interesting conversation,” “a caring environment” for growth.

I believe if you create a container where people feel safe, they will feel free to argue, and from that friction often comes accelerated progress. What I wanted was for this deeply talented group of people, who often feel alone and unsupported, to know that others share their burdens, encourage their successes, and are there to help burnish their ideas. In this comfortable house, filled with delicious home-cooked meals, what kind of heat could we generate from the clash of ideas about how to build the DWeb?

THE PROCESS:  We started the proceedings with a “keynote” talk by Danny O’Brien and Kurt Opsahl, both formerly with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and now with the Filecoin Foundation, who tried to set the regulatory scene for our builders. When you are heads down in your code, it’s hard to keep your eyes trained on the tech policy regimes in each country. Kurt and Danny were both encouraging. “You have the power to create the rules,” Danny emphasized.  “Dreams are what our stuff is made of,” declared Kurt. “Think a lot about how to build good values into your code.”

Dmitri Zagidulin (center) guides the group through the Seminar unconference days

On the first day, each participant gave a 15-minute “input” talk about a topic of their choosing. They ranged from “Invariant-centric threat modeling”  by Ying Tong Lai to “Homomorphic Quantum-resistant Proxy Reencryption (aka Recrypt)  by Duke Dorje (Identikey). Rae McKelvey traced her decade-long career from PhD student, DAT developer, Awana Digital developer, Ink and Switch researcher, to venture-backed team manager. She recognized that her throughline is “purpose built apps” that solve societies’ problems with code. Brendan O’Brien (iroh) shared tips for picking partners to build the “Cozy Web, “ while Eric Harris-Braun (Holochain Foundation) explained why social coherence is his “Big Why” for building decentralized tech. Around the dining room table, our group came to understand a little better where each person was coming from. Were we brave enough to share not only our conceptual frameworks, but also the problems we were having trouble solving?

Greg Slepak of OK Turtles Foundation leads a session outdoors
The group narrowed topics to seven sessions.

Days 2 and 3 were pure unconference, as the group curated rounds of discussions on topics they wanted to dive into deeply. Redesigning an “Internet 2” stack drew from every area of the group’s expertise; UI Patterns for Peer-to-peer, and collaborative data model requirements were other hot topics.

Over homemade falafel and fudge brownies, the group powered through topic after topic. Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) blended nicely with barbequing vege-kebabs and much CRDT work (aka –Cooking Real Delicious Tri-tip) was accomplished by all. Matthew Weidner proved he had mastered decentralized collaboration, at least with his partner Tiffany as they whipped out fruit galettes. We discovered the best conversations occur over a basin of soapy dishes.

Master chef, Scott “Nanomonkey” Garrison and Brendan O’Brien contemplate BFTs over the grill
Tiffany and Matthew prepared fruit galettes to keep the group going long into the evening.

THE PUBLIC: Next this group brought their core questions to the public in the DWeb Weekend (August 16-17) at the Internet Archive.  Day 1 focused on unconference-style discussions, while Day 2 was devoted to talks and hands-on workshops. Across five spaces and three sessions, the community brainstormed on topics such as Christian Tschudin’s table of contents for a DWeb Textbook, and Commons Infrastructure with Dmitri Zagidulin. Duke Dorje led us through a simulation of a future-state in which censorship, statelessness, and dissolving trust are answered in part by new forms of cryptographic key management. 

Associate Research Director Andreas Dzialocha adn Dmitri Zagidulin, editor, kick off the DWeb Weekend unconference day at the Internet Archive in San Francisco

On Sunday, people got the chance to play with apps built on Holochain’s Moss or send small packets from device to device using Tiny SSB. In one room was a debate with HyperHyper Space’s founder, Santiago Bazerque, and in another were coders testing out Greg Slepak’s (OK Turtles Foundation)  Shelter Protocol and its first implementation, Chelonia. David Thompson (Spritely Institute) explained the nuts and bolts of object capabilities, helping a roomful of CRDT experts imagine how they might build on top of Spritely.  Later, Matthew Weidner drew from his academic work to show how collaborative editing might be possible in the DWeb. Akhilesh Thite demoed his Peersky Browser, a browser that natively runs decentralized protocols like IPFS, IPNS, and Hypercore. And rounding out the day, Ying Tong Lai took us through a threat modelling exercise with an eye to the fact that the EU is rolling out digital IDs in just a few years.

Santiago Bazerque (center) leads a discussion “From ‘conflict free’ to ‘conflict resolution’: a case for a BFT distributed database”

THE OUTCOMES:  The DWeb Seminar was structured with a tangible output in mind: that the participants would produce a paper synthesizing what happened during our time together. Christian mused it could capture a “timestamped zeitgeist” so that in a decade we can look back at what this group thought was important. 

The idea of a DWeb Textbook is being nurtured as an open source, community collaboration, with the assets to be stored in the DWeb’s Gitlab. A group of a half dozen people stepped forward to get the ball rolling.

Conceptual models of the base CRDT layer
The group is refining their schema for decentralized, offline-first systems

Among the Seminar participants, there seems to be emerging a first rough consensus on how a “Base CRDT” could be configured. From concept drawings to presentation slides, our group is sharing their architectural ideas with the wider public, refining the principles, soliciting feedback.

As I helped do the final cleanup of our homey venue, the post-its left behind formed a patchwork quilt of key challenges to solve: Pruning, Composability, DAGs, BFTs, Authorship Provenance. These are the “shadow future” on the edge of our DWeb present. But the real impact of our week is undoubtedly human. Can Andreas run P2Panda over David’s Spritely?  Should this group be building atop Brendan’s iroh stack? Now that Eric and Santiago share a common vocabulary, is collaboration more likely?  Only time will tell. The mission of the DWeb is to “connect people, projects and protocols to build a decentralized web,” but there is a reason we put “people” first. 

Seminar organizers Wendy Hanamura, Scott Garrison, Christian Tschudin, Kevin Nguyen, Andreas Dzialocha. Missing: Dmitri Zagidulin

THE WHY:  When Brewster asked me to produce the first Decentralized Web Summit in 2016, we featured the “Father of the Internet” Vint Cerf, and the “Father of the Web” Sir Tim Berners-Lee, pioneers in the brave, new online world we now inhabit. The original 80 people we invited to Builders Day included the next generation of builders of a radical redesign of Web 2.0. Today, nine years later, yet another generation of P2P architects is sketching out the stack they hope others may one day come to use. I believe this week of deeply esoteric conversations has brought us a few steps closer. (Brilliant minds + human connections = potential breakthroughs.)

But why do I commit myself to this vision? In 2023, I retired from the Internet Archive, and yet here I am camped out in a house with 15 developers. It doesn’t take a seer to imagine our near future: massive amounts of data are erased from the Web; truth fractures; climate change and war create people who are stateless and without official identities; the chasm between the powerful and powerless grows ever wider. These problems are creating demand for new and better tools. Users are looking for alternatives in the marketplace. Our friends at Bluesky could not have predicted Elon Musk’s Twitter take-over, but fortunately, their protocol and app were relatively ready for the moment when millions flocked to them away from X. We need to be ready.

The moment for local-first, P2P working code is here. As Larry Lessig said, “Code is Law” and if you write good values into the code, perhaps that can combat the seemingly intractable power imbalances before us. Maybe not. But I want to do everything in my power to support those who are speaking righteously through their code. I believe the adjacent possible is attainable.

NOTE: to watch the talks from DWeb Weekend please visit https://archive.org/details/DWeb-Seminar-2025

Looking back on “Preserving the Internet” from 1996

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As the Internet Archive celebrates 1 trillion web pages archived, it’s worth revisiting what founder Brewster Kahle imagined back in 1996—when the web was still young and the Wayback Machine was years away from its public debut.

Nearly three decades ago, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle sketched out a bold vision for preserving the web before it could slip away—warning that without action, the digital age might echo the cultural losses of Alexandria’s library or early film reels.

Today, in 2025, many of the ideas he laid out in “Preserving the Internet,” published in the March 1997 issue of Scientific American, have come to life: a global digital library, tools that fight link rot, and researchers mining web history to understand our present. Other challenges he foresaw—like obsolete formats, legal battles, and questions of digital memory—remain pressing, but his optimism still holds: by building archives together, we can create a more reliable, enduring memory for the internet age.

Read the published paper in Scientific American.
Read the original pre-print via the Wayback Machine, or below:

Preserving the Internet
Brewster Kahle
Internet Archive
11/4/96
Bold efforts to record the entire Internet are expected to lead to new services.
Submitted to Scientific American for March 1997 Issue

The early manuscripts at the Library of Alexandria were burned, much of early printing was not saved, and many early films were recycled for their silver content. While the Internet’s World Wide Web is unprecedented in spreading the popular voice of millions that would never have been published before, no one recorded these documents and images from 1 year ago. The history of early materials of each medium is one of loss and eventual partial reconstruction through fragments. A group of entrepreneurs and engineers have determined to not let this happen to the early Internet.

Even though the documents on the Internet are the easy documents to collect and archive, the average lifetime of a document is 75 days and then it is gone. While the changing nature of the Internet brings a freshness and vitality, it also creates problems for historians and users alike. A visiting professor at MIT, Carl Malamud, wanted to write a book citing some documents that were only available on the Internet’s World Wide Web system, but was concerned that future readers would get a familiar error message “404 Document not found” by the time the book was published. He asked if the Internet was “too unreliable” for scholarly citation.

Where libraries serve this role for books and periodicals that are no longer sold or easily accessible, no such equivalent yet exists for digital information. With the rise of the importance of digital information to the running of our society and culture, accompanied by the drop in costs for digital storage and access, these new digital libraries will soon take shape.

The Internet Archive is such a new organization that is collecting the public materials on the Internet to construct a digital library. The first step is to preserve the contents of this new medium. This collection will include all publicly accessible World Wide Web pages, the Gopher hierarchy, the Netnews bulletin board system, and downloadable software.

If the example of paper libraries is a guide, this new resource will offer insights into human endeavor and lead to the creation of new services. Never before has this rich a cultural artifact been so easily available for research. Where historians have scattered club newsletters and fliers, physical diaries and letters, from past epochs, the World Wide Web offers a substantial collection that is easy to gather, store, and sift through when compared to its paper antecedents. Furthermore, as the Internet becomes a serious publishing system, then these archives and similar ones will also be available to serve documents that are no longer “in print”.

Apart from historical and scholarly research uses, these digital archives might be able to help with some common infrastructure complaints:

– Internet seems unreliable: “Document not found”
– Information lacks context: “Where am I? Can I trust this information?”
– Navigation: “Where should I go next?”

When working with books, libraries help with some of these issues, with “the stacks” of books, links to other libraries and librarians to help patrons.

Preservation of our Digital History

Where we can read the 400 year-old books printed by Gutenberg, it is often difficult to read a 15 year-old computer disk. The Commission for Preservation and Access in Washington DC has been researching the thorny problems faced trying to ensure the usability of the digital data over a period of decades. Where the Internet Archive will move the data to new media and new operating systems every 10 years, this only addresses part of the problem of preservation.

Using the saved files in the future may require conversion to new file formats. Text, images, audio, and video are undergoing changes at different rates. Since the World Wide Web currently has most of its textual and image content in only a few formats, we hope that it will be worth translating in the future, whereas we expect that the short lived or seldom used formats not be worth the future investment. Saving the software to read discarded formats often poses problems of preserving or simulating the machines that they ran on.

The physical security of the data must also be considered. Natural and political forces can destroy the data collected. Political ideologies change over time making what was once legal becomes illegal. We are looking for partners in other geographic and national locations to provide a robust archive system over time. To give some level of security from commercial forces that might want exclusive access to this archive, the data is donated to a special non-profit trust for long-term care taking. This non-profit organization is endowed with enough money to perform the necessary maintenance on the storage media over the years.

Packaging enough meta-data (information about the information) is necessary to inform future users. Since we do not know what future researchers will be interested in, we are documenting the methods of collection and attempt to be complete in those collections. As researchers start to use these data, the methods and data recorded can be refined.

Technical Issues of Gathering Data

Building the Internet Archive involves gathering, storing, and serving the terabytes of information that at some point were publicly accessible on the Internet.

Gathering these distributed files requires computers to constantly probe the servers looking for new or updated files. The Internet has several different subsystems to make information available such as the World Wide Web (WWW), File Transfer Protocol (FTP), Gopher, and Netnews. New systems for three-dimensional environments, chat facilities, and distributed software require new efforts to gather these files. Each of these systems requires special programs to probe and download appropriate files. Estimating the current size, turnover, and growth of the public Internet has proven tricky because of the dynamic nature of the systems being probed.

Protocol Number of Sites Total Data Change rate

WWW 400,000 1,500GB 600GB/month

Gopher 5,000 100GB declining (from Veronica Index)

FTP 10,000 5,000GB not known

Netnews 20,000 discussions 240GB 16GB/month

The World Wide Web is vast, growing rapidly, and filled with transient information. Estimated at 50 million pages with the average page online for only 75 days, the turnover is considerable. Furthermore, the number of pages is reported to be doubling every year. Using the average web page size of 30 kilobytes (including graphics) brings the current size of the Web to 1.5 terabytes (or million megabytes).

To gather the World Wide Web requires computers specifically programmed to “crawl” the net by downloading a web page, then finding the links to graphics and other pages on it, and then downloading those and continuing the process. This is the technique that the search engines, such as Altavista, use to create their indices to the World Wide Web. The Internet Archive currently holds 600GB of information of all types. In 1997 we will have collected a snapshot of the documents and images.

The information collected by these “crawlers” is not, unfortunately, all the information that can be seen on the Internet. Much of the data is restricted by the publisher, or stored in databases that are accessible through the World Wide Web but are not available to the simple crawlers. Other documents might have been inappropriate to collect in the first place, so authors can mark files or sites to indicate that crawlers are not welcome. Thus the collected Web will be able to give a feel of what the web looked like at a particular time, but will not simulate the full online environment.

While the current sizes are large, the Internet is continuing to grow rapidly. When it is common to connect one’s home camcorder to the upcoming high bandwidth Internet, it will not be practical to archive it all. At some point we will have to become more select what data will be of the most value in the future, but currently we can be afford to gather it all.

Storing Terabytes of Data Cost Effectively

Crucial to archiving the Internet, and digital libraries in general, is the cost effective storage of terabytes of data while still allowing timely access. Since the costs of storage has been dropping rapidly, the archiving cost is dropping. The flip side, of course, is that people are making more information available.

To stay ahead of this onslaught of text, images, and soon video information we believe we have to store the information for much less money than the original producers paid for their storage. It would be impractical to spend as much on our storage as everyone else combined.

Storage Technologies Cost per GigaByte Random access time

Memory (RAM) $12,000/GB 70nanoSeconds

Hard Disk $200/GB 15miliSeconds

Optical Disk Jukebox $140/GB 10seconds

Tape Jukebox $20/GB 4minutes

Tapes on shelf $2/GB human assistance required

(1 GigaByte = 1000 MegaBytes, 1TeraByte = 1000GigaBytes. A GigaByte is roughly enough to store 1000 books or 1 hour of compressed video)

With these prices, we chose hard disk storage for a small amount of the frequently accessed data combined with tape jukeboxes. In most applications we expect a small amount of information to be accessed much more frequently than the rest, leveraging the use of the faster disk technology rather than the tape jukebox.

Providing Access and New Services

After gathering and storing the public contents of the Internet, what services would then be of greatest value with such a repository? While it is impossible to be certain, digital versions of paper services might prove useful.

For instance, we can provide a “reliability service” for documents that are no longer available from the original publisher. This is similar to one of the roles of a library. In this way, one document can refer, through a hypertext link, to a document on another server and a reader will be able to follow that link even if the original is gone. We see this as an important piece of infrastructure if the global hypertext system is to become a medium for scholarly publishing.

Another application for a central archive would be to store an “official copy of record” of public information. These records are often of legal interest, helping to determine what was said or known at a particular time.

Historians have already found the material useful. David Allison of the Smithsonian Institution has used the materials for an exhibit on Presidential Election websites, which he thinks might be the equivalent to saving videotapes of early TV campaign advertisements. David Eddy Spicer of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government has used the materials for their “case studies” in much the same way they collect old newspapers articles to capture a point in time.

With copies of the Internet over time and cross correlation of data from multiple sources, new services might help users understand what they are reading, when it was created, and what other people thought of it. With these services, people might be able to give a context to the information they are seeing and therefore know if they can trust it. Furthermore, the coordination of this meta-information and usage data can help build services for navigating the sea of data that is available.

Companies are also interested in saving similar information and building similar services based on their internal information to help employees effectively learn from the experiences of others.

The technologies and the services that will grow out of building digital archives and digital libraries could lead towards building a reliable system of information interchange based on electrons rather than paper. Using the “library” might be done many times a day to use documents that are no longer available on the Internet.

Legal and Social Issues

Creating an archive of informal and personal information has many difficult legal and social issues even if the material was intended to be publicly accessible at some point. Such a collection treads into the murky area intellectual property in the digital era. What can be done with the digital works that are collected gets into the area of copyright, privacy, import/export restrictions, and possession of stolen property.

To give a few examples: what if a college student made a web page that had pictures of her then-current boyfriend, but later wanted to take it down and “tear it up”, yet it lived on in digital archives (whether accessible or not). Should she have the right to remove that document? Should a candidate for political office be able to go back 15 years to erase his postings to public bulletin boards that have been saved in the Archive? What if a software program that is legal to publish in Denmark, but illegal in the United States is collected by an archive: should this program be removed and hidden even from historians and scholars? The legal and social issues raised by the construction of the Archive are not easily resolved.

By allowing authors to exclude their information from the Archive we hope to avoid some of the immediate issues, and allow enough time to pass to understand the larger issues at hand.

The Internet Archive might be able to help resolve some of these issues by publicly drawing the issues out and by participating in the debates. While many of these questions will take years to resolve, we feel it is important to proceed with the collection of the material since it can never be recovered in the future.

Where does it go from here?

The new technologies and services currently being created might be useful in all digital libraries and help make the Internet more robust and useful.

Through an archive of what millions of people are interested in making public, we might be able to detect new trends and patterns. Since these materials are in computer readable form, searching them, analyzing them, and distributing them has never been easier. A variety of services built on top of large data sets will allow us to connect people and ideas in new ways.

For instance, Firefly Inc. is using the individual tastes in music and movies to help suggest other CD’s and videos based on finding “similar” people. They have even found that people are interested in communicating with the other “similar” people directly thus forming communities based on similar interests. This kind of computer matchmaking which is based on detailed portraits of people’s preferences suggests similar services based on reading habits.

Trends in academic fields might be able to be detected more easily by studying gross statistics of the communications in the field. The hypertext links of the World Wide Web form an informal citation system similar to the footnote system already in use. Studying the topography of these links and their evolution might provide insights into what any given community thought was important.

If archiving cultural and personal histories become useful commercially, then the efforts can be expanded to record radio and video broadcasts. These systems might allow us to study these effects and influences on our lives.

Current terabyte technologies (storage hardware and management software) are relatively rare and specialized because of their costs, but as the costs drop we might see new applications that have traditionally used non-computer media. For instance,

– A video store holds about 5,000 video titles, or about 7 terabytes of compressed data.
– A music radio station holds about 10,000 LP’s and CD’s or about 5 terabytes of uncompressed data.
– The Library of Congress contain about 20 million volumes, or about 20 terabytes text if typed into a computer.
– A semester of classroom lectures of a small college is about 18 terabytes of compressed data.

Therefore the continued reduction in price of data storage, and also data transmission, could lead to interesting applications as all the text of a library, music of a radio station, and video of a video store become cost effective to store and later transmitted in digital form.

In the end, our goal is to help people answer hard questions. Not “what is my bank balance?”, or “where can I buy the cheapest shoes”, or “where is my friend Bill?” – these will be answered by smaller commercial services. Rather, answer the hard questions like: “Should I go back to graduate school?” or “How should I raise my children?” or “What book should I read next?”. Questions such as these can be informed by the experiences of others. Can machines and digital libraries really help in answering such questions? In the long term, we believe yes, but perhaps in new ways which would have importance in education and day-to-day life.

Further Reading:

Preserving Digital Objects: Recurrent Needs and Challenges, December 1995 presentation at 2nd NPO conference on Multimedia Preservation, Brisbane, Australia.

The Vanished Library, Luciano Canfora. University of Berkeley Press, 1990.

Biography:

Brewster Kahle is a founder of the Internet Archive in April 1996. Before that, he was the inventor of the Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS) system in 1989 and founded WAIS Inc in 1992. WAIS helped bring commercial and government agencies onto the Internet by selling Internet publishing tools and production services to companies such as Encyclopaedia Britannica, New York Times, and the Government Printing Office.

Schooled at MIT (BSEE ’82), Brewster designed super computers in the 80’s at Thinking Machines Corporation.

From India to the World: A Scholar’s Tribute to the Internet Archive

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Every day, people around the world use the Internet Archive to learn, research, and discover. Aadarsh Pathak, a scholar in India, called the Internet Archive “a guardian of our collective digital heritage” in a recent note. His words inspire us—and we’d love to hear yours as we celebrate 1 trillion web pages archived.

Share your story through our testimonial form.

Aadarsh Pathak,
Research Scholar,
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University
I am writing to you as a research scholar to express my profound gratitude for your visionary creation, the Internet Archive. It is not merely a digital library; for academics like myself, it is an indispensable and unparalleled resource.

Your incredible project has preserved countless historical documents, books, and web materials that would have otherwise been lost to time. The ability to access primary sources, trace the evolution of ideas through archived web pages, and find rare texts has been absolutely critical to the depth and authenticity of my research. The Wayback Machine, in particular, has often been my last resort for retrieving crucial online information that has disappeared from the live web.

The Internet Archive is more than just a tool it is a guardian of our collective digital heritage and a powerful democratizing force for knowledge. Your contribution to education, research, and the open access movement is truly monumental and an inspiration to us all.

Thank you for your unwavering commitment to preserving our history and for building a foundation upon which so much future discovery will depend.

With deepest appreciation, 
Aadarsh Pathak 
Research Scholar
Deen Dayal Upadhyaya Gorakhpur University, Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

Public Librarians Partner with Internet Archive to Preserve Local Digital Heritage

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Since 2017, Internet Archive’s Community Webs program has been empowering public libraries and similar organizations to preserve and provide access to the unique culture and digital heritage of their communities. Members of the program receive Internet Archive’s Archive-It web archiving service and Vault digital preservation service, coordinate on funded digitization projects to bring local history collections online, and engage in training, collaboration, and professional development opportunities. The program started with 26 public libraries and has since expanded to over 270 members from across 46 US states, 7 Canadian provinces, and a growing number from outside of North America.

Collectively, these members have preserved tens of thousands of websites totaling over 200 terabytes of data. From local news and politics to arts and culture and neighborhood blogs, these websites provide evidence of how history is unfolding in local communities. As this evidence has increasingly moved online, it has become crucial for community-focused cultural heritage organizations to ensure they have the proper training and tools for preserving and providing access to web-based content. 

“Local history is all about creating meaning in people’s lives by providing a context for understanding how every resident fits into the continuum that is the history of our town. To fulfill this promise, I am working to diversify our contemporary holdings so that they more accurately represent our town’s current character and demographics. But I am continually thwarted by format,” said Anthony Vaver of Westborough Public Library in Massachusetts. “I can ask organizations to donate or scan any print materials that document their history, but because their activity is mostly web-based, the print records may not even be the most important for that organization. The Community Webs program helps us collect meaningful materials across all formats.” 

Many Community Webs members have launched web archiving initiatives at their libraries as a result of the changing local news landscape. As communities have seen their newspapers close, merge, or move to online-only formats, libraries have needed to quickly respond to ensure this irreplaceable local information is available for future users.

“With a decline in the number of print newspapers, it is imperative that local, grassroots news websites be archived,” said Desiree Funston, a librarian at Missoula Public Library in Montana, “History is happening all around us; Community Webs empowers us to preserve it for the future.” 

The Missoula Current, a local, independent online news outlet, is regularly archived by the Missoula Public Library

Funston, who also represents the Montana State Genealogical Society in the program, went on to describe how changes in local news will impact the future of genealogical research if local organizations don’t act now to preserve online content. “As the cost of publishing newspaper obituaries continues to climb, people are choosing instead to post tributes to their deceased loved ones on funeral home websites,” she said. “If the funeral home should go out of business or its website be compromised, those obituaries would be lost forever. Our partnership with Community Webs enables us to create a permanent web archive of online obituaries from across the state of Montana. This collection will have a lasting impact on genealogists who research Montana residents.”

In describing her work to preserve the community newsletter The Cedar Mill News, Liz Paulus of the Cedar Mill and Bethany Community Libraries in Oregon said, “These pages showcase a rich and varied record of community engagement and culture that would otherwise be undiscoverable. The Cedar Mill and Bethany Libraries are fortunate to have this opportunity to use the Archive-It platform to create web archives that shine a light on our communities making their way through times of change and growth, offering glimpses of the past to help inform our future.”

Hancock County Library System’s Gulf Coast Mardi Gras Collection provides access to archived web pages documenting the area’s vibrant culture and traditions

Every community has its own unique culture and Community Webs members have worked to document that culture through web archiving. Ash Parker of Hancock County Library System (HCLS) in Mississippi described preserving an important local tradition by saying, “One of HLCS’s first collecting priorities was preserving web content about one of the local traditions that makes the Mississippi Gulf Coast unique – Mardi Gras.  Hancock County is about an hour away from iconic New Orleans.  Local residents, some of whom are themselves transplants from New Orleans, are serious about their Carnival traditions. We currently capture the websites of some of our main Krewes, groups that spend most of the year planning parades and balls during Carnival season, and curate local news articles capturing the history of these treasured events.  We hope to continue preserving this local tradition for future generations through digitizing physical items and crawling born-digital content on the Internet. As this collection grows, it will be a searchable trove of information and images that captures this special side of the Gulf Coast.”

Other program members have found that reaching out to local website creators about preserving their online content has led to opportunities for collaboration and community-building. “Reaching out to site owners to inform them of our web archiving has, of course, made it possible to ensure that their web content remains accessible even when their project or ability to pay for web hosting ends, but it has also been a wonderful opportunity to start conversations and forge new connections: We see you. We believe that your work has enduring value. We are here to help it endure,” said Carissa Pfeiffer of Buncombe County Libraries in North Carolina. “So far, we have saved at least one blog and one genealogy resource which had been planned for deletion by their respective owners, alongside websites whose contents reveal, for instance, public efforts to hold local government accountable for reparations efforts.” 

The Buncombe County Libraries in North Carolina documented the aftermath of Hurricane Helene by archiving websites from grassroots relief organizations

Pfeiffer also reflected on the importance of archiving online content in the aftermath of a natural disaster. “In late September 2024, Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. A critical challenge was the near-total loss of regular methods of communications (internet, cell service, and power). As WiFi began to return, first to local hubs like public libraries, new web pages popped up—crowdsourced roundups of information on where to find supplies, websites for grassroots relief organizations, dedicated Helene resource pages from local governments—and then changed rapidly as new information was shared,” she said. “Thanks to Community Webs, we’ve been able to document these early examples of information-sharing during a disaster, along with news articles, blog posts, web-published reports, and so much more. As our region comes up on the one-year mark following Helene, researchers can use these resources to analyze what took place, and plan for resiliency moving forward.” 

Interested in learning more about Community Webs? Explore Community Webs collections, read the latest program news, or apply to join!

Registration is Now Open for Internet Archive’s October Events

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This October, the Internet Archive will celebrate an extraordinary milestone: 1 trillion web pages preserved and available for access via the Wayback Machine.

The series of events scheduled throughout October will highlight the people, technology, and community efforts that have made this achievement possible, and will look ahead to the future of web preservation as we continue building the web’s collective memory together.

Oct 7 – The Vast Blue We: An interactive evening of live music with Del Sol Quartet, featuring new works by Erika Oba and Sam Reider, exploring the wonder of human collaboration. (7–8:15pm PT | San Francisco & online) — Learn more & register

Oct 21 – Doors Open 2025: Go behind the scenes at the Physical Archive to see the lifecycle of books, records, film, and more—from donation to digitization. (6–8pm PT | In person only) — Learn more & register

Oct 22 – The Web We’ve Built: Our annual celebration, marking 1 trillion webpages preserved in the Wayback Machine. Join us in San Francisco or online for an evening of talks, performances, and community. (5–10pm PT | Live stream 7–8pm PT) — Learn more & register

Calling All Musicians: Mini Concerts at the Internet Archive

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Santa Cruz-based steel lap guitarist, Bill Walker, performing at a virtual staff meeting (2020).

Since 2020, the Internet Archive has been inviting musicians from around the world to play short live sets for our virtual staff meetings. What started as a way to bring our staff together and support artists during the earliest days of the pandemic has grown into a beloved tradition: twice a week, we gather online for 10 minutes of live music before diving into our Monday morning or Friday lunch staff meetings. Check out past performances here.

We’d love to feature you!

How It Works

  • Performance: A 10-minute set via Zoom before one of our staff meetings
  • Schedule Options:
    • Mondays: Sound check at 9:40 AM PT, performance from 9:55–10:05 AM PT
    • Fridays: Sound check at 11:40 AM PT, performance from 11:55 AM–12:05 PM PT
  • Honorarium: $100 + tips (via Venmo or PayPal)
  • Creative Freedom: Play what you love—we welcome all genres, styles, and sounds!
  • Optional: With your permission, we’ll record and archive your performance.

Our friendly audio tech will help with setup, and we recommend using the latest version of Zoom on your computer for best sound.

How to Get Involved

Why Play for the Archive?

The Internet Archive is a nonprofit research library with a mission to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. Our staff—curious, grateful, and globally distributed—loves starting and ending the week with new music. It’s a short, fun way to share your sound with a receptive, appreciative audience.

We’d love to hear from you!

Vanishing Culture: Why Preserve Flash?

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The following guest post from free-range archivist and software curator Jason Scott is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.

Badger by AlbinoBlackSheep (John Picking, 2003).

At the Internet Archive we have a technical marvel: emulators running in the browser, allowing computer programs—after a fashion and with some limits—to play with a single click. Go here, and you’re battling aliens. Go there, and you’re experiencing what a spreadsheet program was like in 1981. It’s fast, fun, and free.

We also encourage patrons to upload the software that affected their early lives, and to then encourage others to play these programs with a single click. And so, they do—many, many people working through an admittedly odd set of instructions to make these programs live again.

But of the dozens of machines and environments our system supports, one very specific one dwarfs the others in terms of user contributions: thousands and thousands of additions compared to the relative handful of others. And what is that environment?

Flash.

Created in the 1990s through acquisition and focusing its playability within then-nascent browsers, Flash (once Macromedia Flash, later Adobe Flash) was a plug-in and creation environment designed to bring interactivity to websites and provide a quick on-ramp to making some basic applications across various machines. Within a few years, it was something else entirely.

Originally, it was something as simple as a website where rolling your mouse over a button made it light up or play a sound. Soon it became little animations playing in a splash screen. Some machines had their resources taxed by this alternate website technology—but soon many major sites couldn’t live without it.

Flash flew across the mid-2000s internet sky in a blaze of glory and unbridled creativity. It was the backbone of menus and programs and even critical applications for working with sites. But by 2009, bugs and compatibility issues, the introduction of HTML5 with many of the same features, and a declaration that Flash would no longer be welcome on Apple’s iOS devices, sent Flash into a spiral that it never recovered from.

But thanks to the Archive’s emulation, Flash lives again, at least as self-contained creations you can play in your browser. 

Explore the Flash software library preserved and emulated at the Internet Archive.

What emerges, as thousand of these Flash animations and games arrive, is what part it played in the lives of people now in their twenties and thirties and beyond. “Almost like being given a moment to breathe, or to walk into a museum space and see distant memories hung up on walls as classic art,” our patrons wrote in. 

For a rather sizable amount of people using computers from the late 1990s to mid 2000s, before Facebook and Youtube pulled away the need for distractions of a simpler sort, Flash was many people’s game consoles. There were countless people, at work and at home, using Flash sites to play to pass the day and night. Games, animation, and toys to flip through and enjoy. And what there had been to enjoy!

A reasonable tinkerer of Flash’s construction and programming environment could create something functional or straightforward in a day or two of playing around. Someone more driven could, across a week of work and lifting ideas and tutorials from elsewhere, emerge from their screens with an arcade-quality game or a parody movie that got an immediate, heartfelt reaction from a grateful audience. Even when the audience wasn’t quite so grateful, it was easy enough to whip up another experimental work and throw it into the public square to see how it landed.

Without some extensive surveying and research (maybe a future Doctorate of Flash History is out there) we may never know exactly what combinations of ease, nostalgia, and variety have left so many people with such a fondness for Flash. But one thing is clear: its preservation is vital.

Recent events have strengthened the need to keep Flash preserved—for example, shutdowns of the Cartoon Network’s website wiped out hundreds of Flash games and animations that only existed on the site, and will never show up on a DVD or streaming service. 

It is everywhere, and nowhere—an easy enough thing to explain, but an impossible thing to transfer over as to the depth and variety of what the garden of creation was. Flash, while under the purview of a single company, became, in contrast to the hundreds of other languages and programs for video and sound, the home for everyone. And now it has a home with the Internet Archive.

About the author

Jason Scott is the Free-Range Archivist and Software Curator of the Internet Archive. His favorite arcade game is Crazy Climber.

Tom Lehrer (1928–2025): A Life in Satire, A Legacy in the Commons

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A purple background text featuring text stating "Tom Lehrer: That Was The Life That Was"

Satirical musical artist Tom Lehrer passed away on July 26, 2025. Lehrer is best remembered for his sharp wit, engaging musical compositions, and timeless social commentary. In 2020, Lehrer proactively disclaimed his rights under copyright to his lyrics and musical compositions, allowing others to re-use his works without his permission. Lehrer’s dedication of his works to the commons emboldens its power, and reflects his talent to be in-conversation with cultural moments long after he is gone. 

Lehrer’s wit and support for cultural remixing shines through in a 2013 comment where he granted 2Chainz permission to sample “The Old Dope Peddler”. “I grant you m*f*s permission to do this,” Lehrer quipped. To celebrate his life, spirit, and contribution to the public domain, we invite you to explore his works for pleasure, inspiration, or just sheer curiosity. Below are a few fan favorites.

We Will All Go Together When We Go

A funny and dark song spoofing global nuclear annihilation fears during the height of the Cold War. Its cheery and delightful-sounding musical composition juxtaposes against lyrics reflecting a dark vision of “universal bereavement” following armageddon.

The Vatican Rag 

Known for its savvy skewering of the controversy around the resistance to modernizing traditions and rituals, plus who else could write a lyric like “Two, four, six, eight, time to transubstantiate”?

The Elements

A fun, whimsical, and breakneck-paced take on the periodic table, itself building off of the public domain tune of the “Major-General’s Song” from 1879’s The Pirates of Penzance.

This post is published with a CC0 Waiver, dedicating it to the public domain.