One of the highlights of the early days of Matrix was attending the inaugural Decentralised Web Summit back in July 2016 at the Internet Archive. This was an amazing opportunity to meet and collaborate with a huge range of decentralisation projects trying to "lock the web open" and fight back against the perils of centralisation: ranging from the original gangsters (the Web, WAIS, Xanadu, and the Internet itself) through to the newer generation of projects.
Fast forward 10 years, and we were very happy to be able to attend the July 2026 incarnation too! This time it was held outside Berlin at the amazing Alte Hölle collective; what better place to fight surveillance capitalism from than a former Stasi holiday camp. Happily many of the faces and projects from earlier DWebSummits and DWebCamps were present and it was fantastic to sync with folks from ATProto, Spritely, Iroh, P2Panda, Willow and others.
Communication for the camp ran primarily on Matrix, and we were very grateful to end up with Matrix featuring in 4 different sessions: A dedicated talk on the current state of Matrix and all the new P2P Matrix development; a fireside chat on 12(!) years of Matrix and what comes next; a panel looking at how decentralisation has evolved since the 2016 summit and where it might go next; and finally a panel on the state of P2P in general.
The reason for talking about it now is that all the videos have now been published - so, if you missed out on attending at the time, now is the opportunity to sit back, relax, return to the beginning of summer and catch up on what happened at DWebCamp. For your convenience and viewing pleasure, here are the main sessions which featured Matrix:
🔗 Videos
🔗 P2P Matrix: A New Hope
🔗 Twelve Years of Matrix: What Worked, What Didn't, and the Road to a Peer-to-Peer Future
🔗 The Future of P2P
🔗 A Decade of Decentralization: Looking Back, Leaning Forward