Open web initiatives Project Liberty and Solid could be teaming up

Two initiatives to create a extra open internet, the place customers are in command 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 in the ring as a potential buyer for TikTok), introduced that his group has been in discussions with web pioneer Tim Berners-Lee about an integration with Solid, his open source project aimed at giving folks management over their very own information.

In a panel at SXSW, McCourt shared that his staff had “talked to Tim Berners-Lee about Stable,” including that “Challenge Liberty is appropriate with Stable.”

Although he didn’t announce an official partnership, McCourt advised that discussions had been underway on a future collaboration.

“We’re debating, or speaking, proper now about how you can incorporate that — him and Stable, his Stable Pods — into the challenge,” McCourt teased.

Berners-Lee, often known as the father of the World Wide Web, announced in 2018 he had been working with a small staff on the Massachusetts Institute of Know-how to develop Solid. He had additionally tapped British engineer John Bruce to go up Inrupt, a startup constructed on high of the open supply challenge.

Inrupt has gone on to launch a privacy platform aimed at enterprises, the place folks management their information in on-line storage entities known as Private On-line Knowledge Shops, or Pods for brief.

With comparable missions in thoughts, Berners-Lee has been supportive of Challenge Liberty’s efforts. He even backed its TikTok bid, saying: “This challenge has my assist. The net I invented was to offer energy and worth to people, which they don’t have in the mean time.”

Nonetheless, there has not been a proper collaboration between Stable and Inrupt and Challenge Liberty, the latter of which is concentrated on the event of Decentralized Social Networking Protocol (DSNP).

That protocol right this moment is being adopted by a handful of apps and different tasks, 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).

Challenge Liberty additionally recently announced a partnership with Free Our Feeds, an effort focused on protecting the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky’s social community.