Two years ago, the decentralized Web was just a twinkle in the eyes of a few visionaries. In this picture of a future Internet, content leaves today’s silos, like Facebook and Flickr. It duplicates and splits and scatters among hosts around the world, and this distribution protects it from loss, increases privacy, and reduces the power of governments to control it.

The decentralized Web isn’t here yet. But it now has thousands of people working hard to make it happen. It also has an acronym—DWeb—which may sound trivial, but the catching on of an acronym often seems to smooth the road ahead for a technology that will require agreement on a host of things big and little. And some of the main browser providers are taking it seriously and making preparations to access it.