Environment and Setting

It goes without saying that 2025 has been a tumultuous year globally and western societies are having to face the backlash of systems of greed and colonialism and along with it the realization of Europe's heavy reliance on the big brother, the United States of America. From climate activists sorrow starting to be visible in the shocked snow-less christmas of the many to a steadily rising tension of militarization. For developers and enthusiasts of P4P, the sense of needing to bite ones tongue to hold back the "I told you so" is present, but also an optimism that larger societal forces than ourselves are realizing the issues at hand and starting to mobalize. Many between-the-talks-talks touched on where we are heading and the direction things are going, all while sipping tea with an aftertaste of bitter optimism.

The Tea-House

Tea was indeed had! The idea of setting up a tea house was brewing since previous years where Louise and crew made a wonderful effort to assemble a tent with tea and tinkering. The path towards a CCC teahouse in 2025 was murky with unclear states of Komona and assembly registrations. In the end we opted for two assemblies, one in Komona "Lodis" and one in Bits & Bäume, "P4P Tea & Tinkering", a beeline from the original titles of "Solarpunk" assemblies we had in the past.

Zelf and their partner pulled up with a car and provided the basic set up for the P4P-tea house. Honorable mentions are also Lasse and Jens from the Lodis hackerspace in Malmö who helped keeping the place in order and packing up. This year the emphasis was more on the "Tea" than "Tinkering" and the space varied a lot from completely empty to overflowing and fully crowded. 

Neighbourhoods & Connections

If this 39c3 had a P4P title it would be something about Cross-pollination and connections as many new relationships formed accross different projects which had previously never encountered one another. Various projects were present, such as Iroh, Reticulum, P2Panda, Radicle, Briar, I2P, Qaul, DeltaChat, GNUnet, old Scuttlebutters and new 'butts such as the 0asis project. Some of them found their way to the P4P area and others did not but rather saw each other in various workshop settings or self-organized talks. 

The P4P Meet & Greet

In total around 27 people showed up for the meet-and-greet, from various projects and expertise. The first hour was mostly free-flowing chatting and tea after which there was an organized workshop session in which people talked to one another based on questions on a paper, and then answered three prompts. The results of the prompts are as follows:

What's a Recent Development you are Glad to See?

• Interest in compostable and layered protocol ecosystem 
• It is easy to try projects and start using them
• The degeneration of everything is getting us closer to revolution
• Projects are moving towards solving specific issues, an ecosystem model
• Push for european autonomy (should be a chance for P4P)
• Reticulum (encrypted connections accross _all_ the links)
• Shift to Green Energy
• DeltaChat (Signal-like secure messaging via email) 

What is a Problem you Wish would get Solved?

• Sustainable Funding, valuing cooperative incentivizing models
• Easy understandability and ease of use of all P4P software for widespread adoption
• Compostable Decentralized Networking Protocols
• Service Discovery in Large Community Networks
• get people out of lock-in (Twitter, WhatsApp)
• Decentralized MODERATION (spam prevention, compliance with law of specific jurisdictions, code of conduct) (SCALABLE!)
• Scalability in Mesh Routing Protocols
• Low-Energy Anonimity (Tor drains the battery..) ..not only Tor :/ 
• Decentralized networks as an alternative to traditional telecoms in remote rural areas without cellular access yet
• "SPLINTERNET" (artificially breaking the internet)

What's a Problem you Aim to Solve?

• Better testing of P2P networks!
• Learning SQL
• WebRTC in SSB -> Turn server into pub?
• Crypto/identity for multi-device (key management to appear as "one person" from multiple devices). Solutions to L @ Radicle.xyz
• Making everyone aware and Hyped about Decentralization
• Solarnethub.com, software module that uses LoRa to communicate offline. Main issue is sending large files
• Access to knowledge about  P4P technologies
• Resource dissipation (solving the same problems twice)

P4P Offline-First events from 39c3

P4P Official Recorded Talks from 39c3

... I couldn't find any!

Ping zelf or edit this page to add.  

News and Headlines!

Some of the more catch-bait news from the scene includes: 

• Reticulums main developer, Mark Qvist, declared that they would step down and end public-facing development on Reticulum, just two days into congress. 
• Hardware workshops were sold out, always and the que for"Build your own solar powerd Lora node" running over MeshCore, were around 5-6 times the size of the spots available in the workshop (17 spots), indicating a large enthusiasm for off-grid communication networks. 
  • Gus has suggested hosting a LoRa workshop at Lodis sometime soon for those who feel that they missed out
• Cade's research on Digital Identities have been issued a sieze and desist by a certain previously well respected company in the internet security scene... Word goes that they have treated him and the project quite horrendously, trying to hijack the work. Somehow we managed to get a hold of the entire report, read it here: The Digital Identity Event Horizon
• Of course the biggest headline of them all was Cory Doctorow's talk who appeared to all solarpunks (due to his book Walkaway), and many once-upon-a-time baby-hackers delight, (due to his book Little Brother). 

Conclusions and Next Steps

Where are we now? We are on the precipice of change, in society and for P4P networks. With projects such as AnyType paving the way for decentralized mainstream viability, and many of the major challenges of P4P network scalability and deletability somewhat solved, we are entering a time of collective development as an ecosystem. Where it will go? Who knows, yet we are able to nourish our digital habits, networks and collectives in the now, while building bridges of mutual-aid. Next up: FOSDEM 2026.