If you point your favorite browser at https://dweb.me/ right now you will access a decentralized version of the archiving site Archive.org.

Dweb, which may stand for decentralized or distributed, stands for a system that is not centralized. Popular examples of such systems are Napster or Bittorrent.

The core difference between decentralized and distributed is that nodes are interlinked in a variety of ways in distributed systems whereas they may not be in decentralized systems.

Centralized systems put a lot of control into the hands of a few. If a site or service gets taken down for whatever reason, it is gone and cannot be accessed anymore. This won't happen with decentralized systems which make it a lot harder or even impossible to remove a resource.

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Mozilla talked about Dweb recently on the organization's Hacks blog that is aimed at developers and promised to publish follow-up articles on Mozilla's stance on a decentralized or distributed version of the Internet.

The Internet Archive has not announced the launch of the decentralized version of its website anywhere as far as I can tell. The official Internet Archive Blog offers a series of stories and reports about the decentralized web, and it is there that you may receive some information about the current implementation of the decentralized Archive.org resource.

A FAQ answers popular questions about the decentralized web.

It explains its components

A new Decentralized Web requires a decentralized way to store and retrieve the files that make up websites, decentralized log-ins so users can interact, and a peer-to-peer payment system.

why it matters

The original vision of the World Wide Web was to empower users, but many users now complain that too much power and user data is concentrated in the hands of too few corporate and government players, making it easier to conduct warrantless surveillance, feed the public disinformation and impose censorship. It also makes it possible for state-sponsored or criminal hackers to scoop up personal data and passwords of millions of users at a time, and to use that information to create false identities, steal money and more. And over time, huge amounts of creative content—essays, musings, personal messages, photos, videos and other data— have disappeared when commercial entities shut down, or even when they just change their protocols.

and what decentralized storage means

Decentralized storage means that rather than the current system under the World Wide Web, where a file exists in one physical location on a server, a file can instead be stored in multiple computers around the world, possibly with just bits of the file in each one, that all come together and get sent to a user who requests that file.

The Dweb version of Archive.org appears to use a variety of protocols including GUN, Webtorrent, IPFS, and YJS.

It is a bit on the slow side of things right now but works fine for the most part. You may notice, however, that images are not loaded right now. While it is unclear why that is, one possible explanation is that it takes time to make resources truly decentralized.