Stephen Downes

This is a long document containing references to a lot of reserach on the decentralized web. It also adds to that work "a new communication protocol, Linked Data Notifications (published as a W3C Recommendation) which enables decentralised notifications on the Web" and "another core contribution of this work is a Web standards-based implementation of a clientside tool, dokieli, for decentralised article publishing, annotations and social interactions." Add this to your list of essential references.