dokieli: Revolution Will Not Be Centralised

Solid Symposium 2026, London, 2026-04-30

Virginia Balseiro https://virginiabalseiro.com/#me @yesvirginia

🕸️ Addicted to Interwebs. Dial-up and pay as you go. Mom wasn't happy.

✨ Met a stranger on the web also a fan of Michael Jackson. Introduced me to Webmasters Manual. Uploaded first webpage to Geocities - super popular.

👋 ...but Geocities went down and along with it my content.

---

Web stack is not fun. Too many frameworks, libraries, hoops to jump. Expensive!

If it is easier to use a third-party, people are going to use it. 🐸🍲

Even when it is:

• violating their privacy
• mining the fabric of their Being
• extracting the fruits of their intellectual creative labour

You grant to YouTube the right to monetize your Content [...] This Agreement does not entitle you to any payments. - YouTube

You grant us a separate, worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish your blocks, username, and profile. - WordPress / Automattic

Survives termination of this Contract with regard to content provided prior to termination. - LinkedIn

Royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, and worldwide. - Substack

Platform	Revenue	Creator Share	Reality Check
YouTube	~$50B from ads + subscriptions	55% of ads to creators	3% make enough to be above US poverty line
Meta	~$160B	~1%	$2B paid to creators
Medium	private	$28M (2017-2021)	Average writer: ~$50/month
WordPress	~$710M	—	Sold user content to OpenAI/Midjourney w/o consent
Sources: Influencer update, Business of Apps, TechCrunch, 404 Media, Medium, Automattic

People still write.

Convenience keeps us on centralised platforms.

Even this conference was organised in Google Docs.

How are we going to get there if we don't have reasonable alternatives?

So we built one.

You may not know dokieli but you may have heard or said:

• It is not "Solid".
• I don't get what it does.
• It is buggy!
• It is too technical.
• It is a research project not a tool.
• I tried it two years ago, and...
• Who needs another editor?

dokieli is a browser-based authoring system for creating, publishing, and annotating articles based on open web standards.

It does not collect, transmit, or store any data about its users. No analytics, telemetry, or tracking is built into the application.

People choose where their content goes. All of it.

• Citations
• Credibility assessments (see W3C Authentic Web workshop presentation)
• Geo and statistical data
• Versioning
• Archive and Robust Links
• Web Feeds
• Digital Rights (e.g., check compatibility of user preference with storage policies)
• Technical specifications
• ... and anything we can expect from a modern day authoring system.

• Yes, it was a research project. It is a well grounded complex application.
• Touches on a lot of open standards, and so we've been verifying their fitness.
• Talking to people about their needs: content creators, researchers, journalists, technical writers.
• There is a need for alternatives to giant tech companies that give users back their autonomy and control.
• Solving for the right pain. Urgency people feel is around their content and relationships locked in.
• Two people built this, imagine what we can accomplish with more funding.

• Received: Two NLnet grants (140k EUR).
• Knowledge Pixels: Nanoarguments (NLnet project) for scholarly discourse and evidence graphs.
• Ciber Voluntarios: Pilot of server and credibility assessment features.
• NextGraph: Integration for CRDT.
• PodOS, SolidOS, and others.
• Ocean of improvements.
• Knowledge organisation / CMS features, libraries, social fact-checking...
• We think it is possible to have a business model that is not exploitative.