Protecting a free web with federated and self hosted clouds

The privacy and the personal data on the internet are under attack by hackers and international espionage programs. If we want to use the internet as a free and democratic medium again then we have to fix the internet to provide the security and privacy that people deserve.

The internet and the world wide web were originally designed as distributed and federated networks. In the last few years we've seen a trend to more centralized services like Facebook, Google, Dropbox and others. This makes censoring of content, surveillance, hacking and espionage very easy. The internet community has got to go back to a more federated approach -- back to the internet's original intent.

Federated web services make it easier to guarantee the basic rights for people to control their own data as described in the user data manifesto (userdatamanifesto.org).

The Nextcloud community is build an open source and fully federated and distributed network for files and communication. Everyone can run an Nextcloud server at home or somewhere on the internet and collaborate and share with everyone else. Nextcloud can be used to provide file access, syncing, sharing, calendar, contacts, video calling, music and video streaming in a distributed way.

This talk will cover the current problems with surveillance and espionage and strategies on how to fix this problem. It will also discuss the current and upcoming federation features of Nextcloud and how to become part of the community. Another topic will be why the Nextcloud community forked ownCloud to bring it to the next level.