Presenters tabling at Thursday's Demo Night Market are invited to gather on the Main Lawn to practice your pitches, hone your storytelling and receive feedback from mentors and peers.

We'll also test out equipment and internet connection, and ensure you feel ready to demo tomorrow!

Twelve years ago, Matrix set out to solve one of the internet's hardest problems: how to build an open communication network that wasn't owned by any one company. Since then, it has grown into one of the world's largest decentralized messaging ecosystems, used by governments, enterprises, open-source communities, and millions of individuals.

In this fireside conversation, Matthew Hodgson looks back on the journey from ambitious experiment to global infrastructure. What were the pivotal breakthroughs that allowed Matrix to succeed? Which technical bets paid off—and which didn't? What lessons were learned about federation, governance, moderation, security, sustainability, and growing an open ecosystem?

The discussion will also explore the harder questions. Why has decentralized communication remained such a challenge? What tradeoffs proved unavoidable? Where did expectations collide with reality? And what would Matthew build differently if he were starting today?

Finally, we'll turn toward the future. As peer-to-peer networking, local-first applications, AI, and personal ownership of data reshape the web, what role should Matrix play? What pieces of the decentralized stack are still missing? And what will it take to create communication systems that are resilient, interoperable, and genuinely controlled by the people who use them?

This is a candid conversation between fellow P2P technologists about twelve years of successes, setbacks, and hard-earned wisdom—and what they reveal about the next generation of the decentralized internet.

Matrix is a relatively popular open standard for secure decentralised communication. Recently the team who created Matrix got funded to have another go at taking Matrix local-first and P2P, giving a new path towards mainstream Matrix adoption. We'd like to show off what we did, and how far we've got!

Back by popular demand: the DWeb Demo Night Market -- a festive evening kick-off event where you can get a taste of tech from around the world, directly from the decentralized tech stack. We’re highlighting “ready to test” new tools, in a beautifully lit outdoor market, where you can grab a cocktail and wander through dozens of select projects demonstrating their latest breakthroughs.

In part, check out projects to help plan for what sessions to attend in the week ahead.

Take a look at some of the presenters from 2024's Demo Night: https://2024.dwebcamp.org/projects/

10 years ago, the Internet Archive convened the first Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco 2016. Now, we've invited five of the original Builders to look back & look forward with us:

What have we learned? How has the early promise of decentralization panned out? Where to go from here?

This talk invites three representatives from large social networks to discuss how they view the future of P2P from a broad range of expertise in the field of social networks and peer-2-peer. Daniel Holmgren from Bluesky, Matthew Hodgson from Matrix, Adz from P2Panda and Christine Lemmer-Webber from Spritely and ActivityPub.

The session will be moderated by Sammy from the Willow protocol.

There will be a space for interactive questions from audience participation.