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The Volla Community Days event recently brought together innovators and enthusiasts to discuss the future of digital autonomy and privacy. Among the key speakers were Eric Harris-Braun, Executive Director of the Holochain Foundation, and Alastair Ong, Director of Product for Holo Hosting. Their presentations shed light on how Holochain and Holo Hosting are working with Volla to build a truly decentralized internet, putting control back into the hands of the users.
The Evolution of Control: From Centralized to Decentralized
Eric Harris-Braun kicked things off by outlining a compelling historical pattern: the shift in the "locus of control" for critical societal functions. He illustrated this with two major shifts in internet history:
- Message Delivery: Before the internet, sending messages (mail, telegrams) had a per-message cost and was controlled by intermediaries like postal services or telephone companies. The internet, with protocols like SMTP and RFC 822 (email), removed this per-message cost and distributed control, allowing everyone to send messages directly.
- Information Publishing: Similarly, publishing information (newspapers, books, TV) was once controlled by intermediaries. The web, built on HTTP, HTML, and URLs, decentralized publishing, allowing anyone to make information available.
With that context in mind, today we face a new challenge: compromised information spaces – the websites, social media platforms, and online forums where we interact. These spaces are currently held by centralized intermediaries, leading to high monetary and social costs, including massive potential for privacy violation and data manipulation.
Holochain: Shifting the Locus of Control for Engagement Spaces
This is where Holochain can help. Eric explained that Holochain provides new protocols for data transport and shared content standards, similar to how email and the web revolutionized messaging and publishing.
"Holochain does for online engagement spaces what email and the web did for messaging and publishing: it shifts the locus of control of that critical function to those of us holding the infrastructure." - Eric Harris-Braun
Holochain enables the creation of peer-to-peer (P2P) networks where participants directly hold their data and define the rules of engagement. This means:
- No central servers: Data is distributed among participants, eliminating a single point of control or failure.
- User-owned data: Individuals retain ownership and control over their data.
- Reduced costs: Eliminates the "per-seat" or "product-as-user" costs associated with centralized platforms.
Holo Hosting: Bridging the Gap to the Decentralized Web
Alastair Ong, Director of Product for Holo Hosting, explained how Holo Hosting helps Holochain applications work everywhere by providing access to community-owned cloud infrastructure that extends these pure P2P networks.
Holo Hosting recognizes that while P2P is the goal, some situations may still benefit from cloud services. However, instead of relying on "big tech," Holo Hosting leverages a community-owned cloud hosting infrastructure solution, that is, a network powered by HoloPorts. For those unfamiliar, these are small-form-factor server-like hosting-optimized devices run by everyday people, often in their homes and office spaces, bridging the decentralized world of Holochain applications with the existing web.
Holo Hosting currently offers two core services:
- Cloud Nodes: Always-on Holochain nodes for consistent availability, validation, and connectivity, especially useful for smaller, or sparse, networks or specific data security requirements.
- Web Bridge: A simple HTTP-based, read-only way to access Holochain data for audiences who don't want to run a full Holochain node. This enables content delivery to internet users while still leveraging the publishing and social sharing functionality of Holochain data.
As part of his presentation, Alastair demonstrated a simple Kanban board hApp, showing how a cloud node could ensure data availability even when a user's phone is offline, and how using the web bridge, one could publish data for public access on the internet.
Holo and Volla: A Strategic Partnership for Digital Autonomy
The synergy between Holochain's vision and Volla's commitment to producing mobile connectivity hardware that isn't tied to the big players is a powerful one with a bright future.
"Volla is committed to producing connectivity hardware that's not tied to closure of the big players. Holochain provides a means for creating engagement spaces in an ad hoc way on that infrastructure for the participants in those spaces, and that's the match." - Eric Harris-Braun
This partnership is already visible in applications like Volla Messages, where every P2P conversation is its own Holochain network, held only by the participants, with no central intermediary. Similarly, the Volla Recover app allows backup storage to be held by trusted parties selected by the end-users, rather than a central server.
Holo Hosting is actively collaborating with the Volla team, building out these applications and creating the Volla Cloud Engine, the Holochain runtime for Volla devices. This commitment to strategic partnerships is crucial for bringing this vision to life.
Taking Responsibility for a New Digital World
Both Eric and Alastair emphasized that this shift in control comes with a new kind of responsibility for users. Unlike centralized systems where an intermediary manages everything, decentralized systems require active participation. For example, in Volla Messages, you are responsible for sharing contact information and confirming invite codes. This is a fundamental change, but it's the price of true digital autonomy.
The collaboration between Holochain, Holo Hosting, and Volla is paving the way for a more private, secure, and user-controlled internet. By embracing decentralized infrastructure and taking on the responsibility of managing our own digital lives, we can collectively build a future where our data truly belongs to us.
You can watch the Volla Community Days presentations from Eric and Alastair here.