The Invisible Internet Project (I2P) is an anonymous network layer that allows for censorship-resistant, peer-to-peer communication. Anonymous connections are achieved by encrypting the user's traffic, and sending it through a volunteer-run network of roughly 55,000 computers distributed around the world. Given the high number of possible paths the traffic can transit, a third party watching a full connection is unlikely. The software that implements this layer is called an "I2P router", and a computer running I2P is called an "I2P node". I2P is free and open sourced, and is published under multiple licenses.
Tribler is an open source decentralized BitTorrent client which allows anonymous peer-to-peer by default. Tribler is based on the BitTorrent protocol and uses an overlay network for content searching. Due to this overlay network, Tribler does not require an external website or indexing service to discover content. The user interface of Tribler is very basic and focused on ease of use instead of diversity of features. Tribler is available for Linux, Windows, and OS X.
Jack Patrick Dorsey is an American Internet entrepreneur, philanthropist, and programmer, who is a co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, Inc. from 2015 until 2021, as well as co-founder, principal executive officer and chairperson of Block, Inc., which is the developer of the Square financial services platform. As of October 2023, Forbes estimated his net worth to be $3.1 billion.
Block, Inc. is a U.S. listed company founded by Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey in 2009. It is a financial technology conglomerate. The company reportedly serves 56 million users and 4 million businesses, and processes payments worth US$228 billion annually as of 2023.
Distributed social network projects generally develop software, protocols, or both.
Twister is a decentralized, experimental peer-to-peer microblogging program which uses end-to-end encryption to safeguard communications. Based on BitTorrent- and Bitcoin-like protocols, it has been likened to a distributed version of Twitter.
Counterparty is a peer-to-peer financial platform and a distributed, open source protocol built on top of the Bitcoin blockchain and network. It was one of the most well-known "Bitcoin 2.0" platforms in 2014, along with Mastercoin, Ethereum, Colored Coins, Ripple and BitShares.
Syncthing is a free and open source peer-to-peer file synchronization application available for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, Solaris, Darwin, and BSD. It can sync files between devices on a local network, or between remote devices over the Internet. Data security and data safety are built into its design. Version 1.0 was released in January 2019 after five years in beta.
Matrix is an open standard and communication protocol for real-time communication. It aims to make real-time communication work seamlessly between different service providers, in the way that standard Simple Mail Transfer Protocol email currently does for store-and-forward email service, by allowing users with accounts at one communications service provider to communicate with users of a different service provider via online chat, voice over IP, and videotelephony. It therefore serves a similar purpose to protocols like XMPP, but is not based on any existing communication protocol.
The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol, hypermedia and file sharing peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. By using content-addressing, IPFS uniquely identifies each file in a global namespace that connects IPFS hosts, creating a resilient system of file storage and sharing.
ZeroNet is a decentralized web-like network of peer-to-peer users, created by Tamas Kocsis in 2015, programming for the network was based in Budapest, Hungary; is built in Python; and is fully open source. Instead of having an IP address, sites are identified by a public key. The private key allows the owner of a site to sign and publish changes, which propagate through the network. Sites can be accessed through an ordinary web browser when using the ZeroNet application, which acts as a local webhost for such pages. In addition to using bitcoin cryptography, ZeroNet uses trackers from the BitTorrent network to negotiate connections between peers. ZeroNet is not anonymous by default, but it supports routing traffic through the Tor network.
WebTorrent is a peer-to-peer (P2P) streaming torrent client written in JavaScript, from the same author, Feross Aboukhadijeh, of YouTube Instant, and the team at WebTorrent and on GitHub, for use in web browsers, as well as a WebTorrent Desktop stand alone version able to bridge WebTorrent and BitTorrent serverless networks.
The Lightning Network (LN) is a "layer 2" payment protocol built on the Bitcoin blockchain and those of other cryptocurrencies. It is intended to enable fast transactions among participating nodes and has been proposed as a solution to the bitcoin scalability problem. It is a peer-to-peer system for making micropayments of cryptocurrency through a network of bidirectional payment channels, without delegating custody of funds.
ActivityPub is an open, decentralized social networking protocol based on Pump.io's ActivityPump protocol. It provides a client/server API for creating, updating, and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content.
The Open Network is a decentralized computer network consisting of a layer-1 blockchain with various components. TON was originally developed by Nikolai Durov and the messaging platform, Telegram and now embraced by a global community of independent contributors.
Secure Scuttlebutt (SSB) is a peer-to peer communication protocol, mesh network, and self-hosted social media ecosystem. Each user hosts their own content and the content of the peers they follow, which provides fault tolerance and eventual consistency. Messages are digitally signed and added to an append-only list of messages published by an author. SSB is primarily used for implementing distributed social networks, and utilizes cryptography to assure that content remains unforged as it is propagated through the network.
Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing is an open protocol developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to facilitate digital contact tracing of infected participants. The protocol, like competing protocol Pan-European Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing (PEPP-PT), uses Bluetooth Low Energy to track and log encounters with other users. The protocols differ in their reporting mechanism, with PEPP-PT requiring clients to upload contact logs to a central reporting server, whereas with DP-3T, the central reporting server never has access to contact logs nor is it responsible for processing and informing clients of contact. Because contact logs are never transmitted to third parties, it has major privacy benefits over the PEPP-PT approach; however, this comes at the cost of requiring more computing power on the client side to process infection reports.
Bluesky, also known as Bluesky Social, is a decentralized microblogging social platform and a public benefit corporation based in the United States. Jay Graber serves as the company's CEO and XMPP creator Jeremie Miller sit on its board of directors.
Conversations is a free software, instant messaging client application software for Android. It is largely based on recognized open standards such as the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) and Transport Layer Security (TLS).
