Keynote20 min○ in progress
Who Can Switch Off Your Media?
Who controls our ability to publish and access content? Exploring platform dependencies, censorship and decentralized alternatives.
Chris H, Ethereum Stewred
Devcon 8 · Mumbai · November 3–6, 2026
// devcon program day
Decentralized Media Day
Thursday, November 5, 2026 · Resilient Networking Hub, Devcon 8 Mumbai
A full day of talks, workshops and live experiments, curated by Swarm Foundation together with friends from libp2p, Nyx Foundation, IPFS, Filecoin, Meshworks and the Ethereum Foundation at the Resilient Networking Hub, Devcon 8. Everyone is welcome — come curious and you'll leave with something you can try for yourself.
Can we publish, distribute, stream and access media without depending on a company that can take it offline?
// the challenge
Publishing is easy. Staying accessible is not.
- Most of the internet we use every day leans on someone else's infrastructure: websites on hosting providers, livestreams on streaming platforms and CDNs, and even many decentralized applications on gateways that someone else operates.
- That's usually convenient, until it isn't. These dependencies create single points of failure, room for censorship, and infrastructure that users can't steer themselves.
- Decentralized media promises something different: being able to publish and access information without having to ask a platform for permission.
- So the question we'd love to explore with you is a simple one — can decentralized infrastructure actually deliver that promise in the messy conditions of the real world?
// why swarm
Scaling decentralized media with Swarm Foundation
Swarm Foundation is bringing the community together to explore new possibilities for decentralized media. As a key contributor to Ethereum's decentralized web, Swarm is building infrastructure that helps people publish, share and access information without relying entirely on traditional hosting platforms.
From independent websites and digital archives to decentralized publishing and emerging peer-to-peer streaming experiences, Swarm opens up exciting possibilities for how content can be distributed and accessed online. This day is a chance to explore these ideas together, see the technology in action, exchange experiences, and discover how different projects and communities can collaborate to make the decentralized web more accessible and resilient.
Decentralized storage and distribution
Swarm stores content by address and spreads it across participating nodes, so getting hold of something doesn't depend on one machine staying online.
Economic sustainability
Storage incentives, postage stamps and bandwidth accounting answer a very practical question: who pays to keep information available and moving across the network?
Browser-based access and media streaming
Current engineering work explores delivering content through browser-connected nodes and supporting video streams without making a centralized CDN the default.
None of this makes resilience automatic — how it performs in practice still depends on node availability, replication, network conditions and how mature the implementations are. That's exactly the part we'll be exploring together on the day.
// open questions
Seven questions we'd love to work through with you
- 01
Can someone publish a website or media file without depending on a centralized hosting platform?
- 02
What happens to content when its publisher goes offline?
- 03
Can viewers access media without relying on a centralized gateway?
- 04
Can peer-to-peer networks support live video delivery at meaningful scale, and what happens when hundreds or thousands of people join?
- 05
What are the actual costs of decentralized publishing in bandwidth, latency, storage persistence, infrastructure and user effort?
- 06
What information about publishers and viewers does the network expose?
- 07
What still prevents ordinary people from using decentralized media tools?
// the format
What the day will look like
activity/01
Publish without a platform
Try publishing a website or a piece of media with Swarm-based tools — no account, no hosting dashboard. Along the way you'll see how deployment, retrieval and persistence actually work.
activity/02
Follow a livestream from camera to viewer
Engineers walk the whole delivery chain — encoding, storage, peer-to-peer distribution and playback — so you get to see the architecture and performance behind the video, not just the video itself.
activity/03
Break the infrastructure
The fun part: we deliberately switch network components off and watch what survives — gateway dependencies, publisher availability, peer failures, latency, and how quickly things recover.
activity/04
Examine real-world alternatives
Builders behind independent browsers, sovereign collaboration tools and decentralized media share what their users can genuinely do today, and which barriers are still standing.
activity/05
A decentralized event, streamed over decentralized infrastructure
We plan to livestream Decentralized Media Day itself over Swarm's peer-to-peer network — putting the very infrastructure we're talking about to a real-world test. You'll be able to follow how the stream travels from camera to viewer, look at its technical dependencies, and see how the network behaves with a real audience on it. Engineers will be watching performance, resilience and the challenges that remain, and we'll share what we find.
// who should participate
Built for the curious
Ethereum developers, P2P and networking engineers, protocol researchers, independent publishers, journalists, designers, digital-rights advocates and anyone building alternatives to platform-controlled media. If any of that sounds like you — or you're simply curious — you'll fit right in.
Some sessions are gentle, hands-on demos; others dig into network topology, browser nodes, content retrieval, failures and performance measurement. Mix and match as you like — there's no exam at the end.
// our position
No victory laps, just honest tests
We won't pretend decentralized media has solved every problem, or that it runs without servers. What we do want is infrastructure where people can choose, operate and replace the services they depend on, instead of being locked into one platform.
The point of the day isn't to declare a winner among decentralized protocols. It's to put real systems to the test and see how much further we can take independent media infrastructure — together.
// program
Sessions
Keynotes, workshops and live experiments, with something for every level of curiosity. Drop into the sessions that interest you — you don't have to stay for all of them.
Keynote40 min● confirmed
The Cost of Platform Dependence for Artists
How platforms control artists' income, visibility, audiences and creative independence, and why alternatives matter.
Subcult, Founder Alaska
Showcase40 min● confirmed
Beyond HTTP Gateways: A Browser That Joins the Network
Demonstrating decentralized content access through Freedom Browser and exploring how P2P browsing reduces reliance on centralized gateways.
Meinhard — Freedom Browser
Workshop60 min● confirmed
Take Your Frontend Off Traditional Hosting
Participants deploy a working website or application frontend on Swarm and explore content availability without conventional hosting.
Aron/Ramesh — Swarm Foundation
Keynote30 min● confirmed
Who Will Preserve Our Digital Memory?
MetaProvide's roots in monastic life and its work on preserving cultural memory, knowledge and information through decentralized infrastructure.
Björn — Founder MetaProvide
Showcase50 min● confirmed
From Camera to Viewer: Streaming This Event Over Swarm
A technical walkthrough of the decentralized streaming infrastructure behind the day's broadcast, from encoding to P2P distribution and playback.
Levi — Solar Punk
Workshop50 min○ in progress
Publishing When Someone Wants You Offline
A practical workshop on censorship-resistant publishing, preservation, distribution and the safety challenges journalists face.
Independent journalist — TBC
Interactive Session50 min○ in progress
The Resilience Test: Kill the Gateway
Controlled network experiments testing gateway failures, peer disconnections, playback interruption and recovery.
Levi + Swarm engineers + P2P researcher
Interactive Session35 min○ in progress
If It's Decentralized but Unusable, Who Will Use It?
Examining usability barriers that prevent creators, publishers and everyday users from adopting decentralized technologies.
Tomo — Ethereum Foundation + Meinhard
Keynote40 min○ in progress
Why We Didn't Stream All of Devcon
An engineering postmortem exploring the decision not to deliver Devcon's multi-stage livestream, including network capacity and centralized gateway trade-offs.
Swarm streaming engineering team
Interactive Session30 min○ in progress
What Has to Work by the Next Devcon?
An open discussion identifying critical engineering challenges, research priorities and opportunities for collaboration.
All contributors
ShowcaseAll day○ in progress
Decentralized Livestream & Media Archive
Livestreaming the day over Swarm, monitoring delivery performance and publishing recordings and materials through decentralized infrastructure.
Swarm streaming team
// agenda
The day, hour by hour
- 09:30–09:50
Who Can Switch Off Your Media? — Chris H
- 09:50–10:30
The Cost of Platform Dependence for Artists — Subcult
- 10:30–11:10
Beyond HTTP Gateways: A Browser That Joins the Network — Meinhard, Freedom Browser
- 11:10–12:10
Workshop: Take Your Frontend Off Traditional Hosting — Aron, Swarm Foundation
- 12:10–12:40
Who Will Preserve Our Digital Memory? — Björn, MetaProvide
- 12:40–13:30
Lunch & Open Demo Stations
- 13:30–14:20
From Camera to Viewer: Streaming This Event Over Swarm — Levi, Solar Punk
- 14:20–15:10
Workshop: Publishing When Someone Wants You Offline — Independent Journalist (TBC)
- 15:10–15:25
Break
- 15:25–16:15
The Resilience Test: Kill the Gateway — Levi + Swarm Engineers + P2P Researcher
- 16:15–16:50
If It's Decentralized but Unusable, Who Will Use It? — Tomo, Ethereum Foundation + Meinhard
- 16:50–17:30
Why We Didn't Stream All of Devcon — Swarm Streaming Engineering Team
- 17:30–18:00
What Has to Work by the Next Devcon? — Open Technical Roundtable
- All day
Decentralized Livestream & Media Archive powered by Swarm (planned), 09:30–18:00.
Draft agenda; session timings and speakers subject to confirmation.
Come along — there's a seat for you
Add your name to the expedition list to join the wider community, and keep an eye on this page — we'll update it as sessions, speakers and timings are confirmed. Bring a laptop if you'd like to try the hands-on parts, and bring your questions; the best conversations usually start there.