Hello folks in this post we shall discuss the impact of a decentralized web, and what that might mean for the future of democracy and human civillization in general. Before we go into discussing this new emerging paradigm, we shall discuss the impact of the web as we know it now. Internet has evolved from what it was primarily know for ie- email and usergroups, it now encompasses a wealth of information including ebooks, music, libraries, institutions and other media like videos, full featured films and social networks. All of these have been characterized as web 3.0 the previous phase being the emergence of search engines and massive filtration or sorting of information which was given the name web 2.0. It was during the emergence of this second phase that certain developments took place that would necessitate the creation of a decentralized architecture later on. What were these developments? 

For one the web became more and more centralized in the hands of search engine conglomerates like Google, Yahoo and the likes. This centralization ensured that more and more robust consumer products were launched each year so that the consumers were self- engulfed in the massive data around them, but with a little trade off and that trade off was privacy. With more and more amazing products came new features that allowed these search engine conglomerates to gather more and more data about the consumers. Be it facial recognition, nfc and the gps, including the sniffing of data from cookies in your browser to recognizing the inputs that would have been typed by an individual ( the keystrokes ). But the data mining operation did not stop here these companies sold data to third party services without the consent of the lone commoner. The phrase " They're watching your every move ", became a common thing after Edward Snowden a net activist first broke away from the inner circle and revealed the depth of surveillance that is carried out by government agencies. The papers also revealed the extent to which these companies participate and share consumer data with the government agencies. This is what finally prompted a new architectural paradigm into the markets. The crypto revolution had begun since then as the early papers of what would later on be known as blockchain and bitcoin were being tested out by a closed community, many had felt that something similar could be done to the internet itself and hence once the blockchain finally took over the markets. An independent group of developers started working on a project Maidsafe. A browser cum search engine with all it's inbuilt services decentralized to the core. I started following this project in it's initial stage of development and now they're in the testing phase. It's quite an exciting project allowing you a decentralized storage an essential feature of this platform is farming, wherein every individual who can support the node gets paid for it. You can create your own custom domains and run dapps on this platform. This platform is still being developed and many services are yet to reach the final testing phase, but it's amazing what these guys have achieved.

Link: https://maidsafe.net