Building an open internet with Fastly’s Fast Forward program

Introduction

From the beginning, Omnifi Foundation has worked to push the reaches of the Internet to the broadest possible audience. We support egalitarian federated networks where, regardless of ethnicity, identity, sexual orientation, or economic background, everyone can own and control their information and connect with one another without fear, artificial barriers, or a need to sacrifice their privacy.

In November 2022 we joined Fastly’s Fast Forward program, a significant step toward building faster, further, and openly alongside partners who share our vision for what the Internet can become. We believe that it’s not just digital networks that should be federated, but the community building them.

What is Fast Forward?

Fast Forward is Fastly’s commitment to supporting the open source projects, nonprofit organisations, and developers who are building an internet that is free, open, and safe for all. Launched in November 2022 as an expansion of Fastly’s open source program (which began in 2014), Fast Forward provides free access to Fastly’s edge cloud platform—the same infrastructure that powers some of the world’s largest websites and applications.

The program represents a substantial investment in the open internet ecosystem. Rather than treating open source support as a marketing exercise or peripheral charity, Fastly has embedded it into their operating model. The organisations they support—including the Rust Foundation, Apache Software Foundation, and Scratch Foundation—are building the foundational tools and standards that the entire digital economy depends upon.

Shared values

The program operates on values that align closely with our own:

These aren’t abstract principles for Fast Forward participants. Organisations accepted into the program commit to sharing knowledge and resources with the broader community—a reciprocal model that strengthens the entire ecosystem rather than extracting value from it.

How it works

To qualify for Fast Forward, organisations must freely distribute their codebase and demonstrate alignment with open source values. If accepted, they receive access to Fastly’s full-site delivery capabilities and Compute@Edge platform at no cost, enabling them to build and deploy at global scale without the infrastructure burden that typically constrains nonprofit and open source work.

This model recognises a fundamental truth about open source sustainability: the projects that underpin our digital infrastructure are chronically under-resourced. By removing infrastructure costs from the equation, Fast Forward allows maintainers and organisations to focus their limited resources on the work that matters most.

The importance of edge computing for open internet work

Edge computing represents a fundamental shift in how digital services can be delivered. Traditional cloud architectures centralise processing in a handful of massive data centres, creating bottlenecks, single points of failure, and latency that disproportionately affects people far from those centres.

Edge infrastructure inverts this model. By processing requests at locations closer to the people being served—often within milliseconds of network distance—edge computing reduces latency, improves reliability, and opens new architectural possibilities.

Why this matters for federation

For our work on federated systems, the implications are profound. Federation distributes control across many independent nodes rather than concentrating it in a single provider. This architectural choice has significant benefits for resilience, autonomy, and resistance to censorship—but it also creates challenges.

Federated networks need to coordinate across many participants, often in real-time. They need to resolve identities, verify credentials, and synchronise state without relying on a central authority. These operations are latency-sensitive; the experience degrades quickly if every interaction requires round-trips to distant servers.

Edge computing makes federation practical at scale. By placing compute resources close to participants wherever they are in the world, we can build federated services that feel as responsive as centralised ones—without sacrificing the principles that make federation valuable.

Privacy-respecting architecture

Edge computing also enables new approaches to privacy. When data can be processed at the edge, it doesn’t need to traverse the network to distant data centres. Sensitive information can be handled locally, with only the necessary results transmitted onward.

This capability is essential for our vision of data sovereignty. People should be able to control where their data lives and how it’s processed. Edge infrastructure makes this technically feasible in ways that weren’t possible with earlier generations of cloud architecture.

What we’re building

Our work focuses on shifting control of data and services from corporations to individuals. We’re developing infrastructure that enables people to freely migrate their data between providers, networks, and borders—securely and privately, without sacrificing the convenience and capability that modern digital services provide.

This is ambitious work that touches many technical domains. Here’s an overview of the areas we’re actively developing:

Federated social data platforms

We’re building infrastructure for federated social data platforms that give people control over their own information and social connections. Rather than having data scattered across dozens of services—each with their own terms and practices—federated approaches enable people to store their data in locations they control and grant granular access to applications as needed.

This inverts the current model where platforms own the data. With federated social data infrastructure, people own their data and applications request access. If you don’t like how an application is behaving, you can revoke its access and switch to an alternative—without losing your information or social connections.

We’re developing tooling and infrastructure with an emphasis on making personal data sovereignty practical for everyday use. This requires performant, globally-distributed infrastructure that can serve data quickly regardless of where it’s stored or where the request originates. Edge computing is essential here—social interactions need to feel immediate regardless of the underlying distributed architecture.

Decentralised identity with DIDs

Decentralised Identifiers (DIDs) are a new type of identifier that enables verifiable, self-sovereign digital identity. Unlike traditional identifiers controlled by centralised registries, DIDs are created and controlled by the identity holder themselves.

DIDs are foundational infrastructure for a more privacy-respecting internet. They enable people to prove things about themselves without revealing unnecessary information, to maintain persistent identities across services without being tracked, and to control their own credentials without depending on corporate gatekeepers.

We’re building DID infrastructure that’s practical for real-world use—fast enough for interactive applications, robust enough for critical identity operations, and accessible enough for broad adoption. Edge computing is essential here; identity verification needs to be fast and reliable regardless of where in the world it’s happening.

Verifiable credentials

Verifiable Credentials are a standard for expressing credentials in a way that is cryptographically secure, privacy-respecting, and verifiable anywhere. They enable new approaches to proving things about yourself—your qualifications, your memberships, your permissions—without revealing more than necessary.

Combined with DIDs, Verifiable Credentials enable scenarios that are difficult or impossible with current identity infrastructure. Proving you’re over 18 without revealing your birthdate. Demonstrating professional qualifications without exposing your entire employment history. Accessing services based on verified attributes rather than surveillance-based profiling.

We’re building Verifiable Credential infrastructure that integrates with the federated identity ecosystem, enabling credentials to be issued, held, and verified across organisational and jurisdictional boundaries.

WebAssembly for portable, secure computation

WebAssembly (Wasm) is a portable binary format that enables code to run securely across different environments—browsers, servers, edge locations, and embedded systems. Originally designed for web browsers, Wasm has evolved into a general-purpose format for portable computation.

We’ve been building production systems with WebAssembly across demanding industries including healthcare, automotive, and aerospace. These domains require exceptional reliability, security isolation, and regulatory compliance—exactly the characteristics that Wasm’s architecture provides. Our work has validated WebAssembly as a foundation for mission-critical systems where portability and security aren’t optional.

In healthcare, we’ve deployed Wasm-based data processing systems that handle sensitive information while maintaining strict isolation guarantees. In automotive and aerospace, we’ve built components that leverage Wasm’s deterministic execution model and sandboxing to meet the stringent safety requirements these industries demand.

Fastly has been a leader in WebAssembly adoption, contributing to the Wasmtime runtime and building their Compute@Edge platform on Wasm foundations. This alignment of technical direction was one of the factors that made Fast Forward such a natural fit for our work. We’re now positioned to bring our production experience with Wasm to edge computing scenarios, combining lessons from safety-critical industries with globally-distributed infrastructure.

The cooperative difference

Omnifi Foundation operates as a cooperative—a structure that shapes how we approach this work and why partnerships like Fast Forward matter to us.

Traditional technology organisations face a fundamental tension between the interests of the people they serve and the demands of investors seeking returns. This tension often resolves in favour of investors, leading to the surveillance capitalism, exploitative design patterns, and platform lock-in that characterise much of the current digital landscape.

Cooperatives resolve this tension by design. As a member-owned organisation, our priorities are set by the people doing the work and the communities we serve, not by external shareholders seeking extraction. When we succeed, the benefits flow to our members and mission, not to distant investors.

This structure has practical implications for how we build technology:

The open internet vision we’re working toward requires organisations that can hold long-term commitments and resist the pressures that have corrupted so much of the digital technology industry. The cooperative structure is our mechanism for doing that.

Looking forward

Joining Fast Forward is one component of our broader infrastructure strategy. It provides the foundation we need to build and deploy federated services at global scale while maintaining our commitment to independence and community funding.

Over the coming months, we’ll share more about:

We’re also eager to connect with others working in these spaces. The open internet isn’t something any single organisation can build—it requires a community of people and projects working toward shared goals with compatible approaches.

Join us

We’re a non-profit cooperative built on legally binding principles of openness, fairness, transparency, and care for the communities we serve. We believe digital technology should empower people rather than exploit them, and we’re working to build the infrastructure that makes this possible.

If these values resonate with you, we’d welcome your involvement. Whether you’re a developer interested in contributing to our projects, an organisation exploring similar challenges, or simply someone who believes the Internet can be better than it currently is—there’s a place for you in this work.

The technical challenges ahead are substantial, but they’re solvable. What’s needed is a community committed to solving them in ways that benefit everyone, not just the privileged few. We’re optimistic about what we can accomplish together.

Learn more about membership or get in touch.