“In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.” - A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace
The Internet is the new home of our Minds. It’s where we discover, produce and share information and it’s where we meet and coordinate freely with others. Being unrestrained in our ability to access information and people is essential to our freedom and to global understanding and collaboration.
Alas, the factories in control of the “global conveyance of thought” have creeped their way into that new world. Today, the state of the Internet is best described by the walled gardens that have captured most of its traffic and the content people produce online. This capture feels benign most of the time. It is enveloped by an effortless user experience and deep integrations across popular apps, making it difficult for someone to imagine themselves without these exact tools.
However, the reality is that over 3 billion (!!) people have unwittingly traded their digital rights, such as the right to privacy, for the comfort of “free” online workspaces and collaboration suites that are controlled by one centralized entity. This has invited unrestrained surveillance and control over our personal data. With the rise of foundation models (AI), this control is only exacerbated, weaponised, and used to justify even more data collection and processing.
We should know better than to tie our whole digital life to entities that put their corporate interests above our digital rights, but we could not necessarily do better… until now.
The first goal of dDocs is to shed light on the performative neutrality of centralised apps like g**gle d*cs, so that we can unmask the exploitative practices it facilitates and help people make informed choices about their digital lives. Its second goal is to be the open alternative to a closed-source tool posing as a digital public good.
To do so, dDocs is designed to be as simple and comfortable to use as centralized apps by abstracting away the complexity of the technologies that guarantee people’s sovereignty.
Contrary to alternatives, dDocs is usable without creating an account, it is optimized for mobile compatibility as most of the world are mobile-native internet users, and it can even be used offline. dDocs will also have an open SDK, allowing anyone to reproduce and reconfigure the tool to their liking and develop it in whatever way they see fit.
dDocs is the culmination of years of work on p2p networks and blockchain research. Its architecture combines p2p networks for file sharing, content addressing as well as real-time collaboration, and public blockchains (Ethereum & Gnosis) to guarantee the protection of people’s freedom by design. This allows dDocs to benefit from:
- Strict global consensus
- Credible neutrality
- Computational and data integrity
- Inter-app composability (smart contracts)
- Group ownership (multisigs)
- Customizability
- Being harder to attack
- Being easy to join and exit
- Universal, Internet-wide accounts (wallets)