Two initiatives to create a extra open net, the place customers are in charge of their very own digital identities and information, could also be coming collectively. At SXSW 2025, entrepreneur Frank McCourt, whose Project Liberty is creating open web infrastructure (and is throwing its hat within the ring as a possible purchaser for TikTok), introduced that his group has been in discussions with web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee about an integration with Solid, his open supply venture geared toward giving individuals management over their very own information.
In a panel at SXSW, McCourt shared that his workforce had “talked to Tim Berners-Lee about Solid,” including that “Project Liberty is compatible with Solid.”
Though he didn’t announce an official partnership, McCourt recommended that discussions had been underway on a future collaboration.
“We’re debating, or talking, right now about how to incorporate that — him and Solid, his Solid Pods — into the project,” McCourt teased.
Berners-Lee, often known as the daddy of the World Wide Web, introduced in 2018 he had been working with a small workforce on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to develop Solid. He had additionally tapped British engineer John Bruce to go up Inrupt, a startup constructed on prime of the open supply venture.
Inrupt has gone on to launch a privateness platform geared toward enterprises, the place individuals management their information in on-line storage entities referred to as Personal Online Data Stores, or Pods for brief.
With comparable missions in thoughts, Berners-Lee has been supportive of Project Liberty’s efforts. He even backed its TikTok bid, saying: “This project has my support. The web I invented was to provide power and value to individuals, which they do not have at the moment.”
However, there has not been a proper collaboration between Solid and Inrupt and Project Liberty, the latter of which is targeted on the event of Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP).
That protocol at the moment is being adopted by a handful of apps and different initiatives, together with MeWe; Soar.com (based by Ancestry.com’s Paul Allen to construct apps by means of a studio mannequin); and the permissionless blockchain Frequency (developed by Project Liberty Labs).
Project Liberty additionally not too long ago introduced a partnership with Free Our Feeds, an effort targeted on defending the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky’s social community.
