• Jeena@jemmy.jeena.net
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    11 months ago

    Yeah, I always wished that Lemmy communities could be decentralized. Moderation, etc. still would work as before, the creator of the community would just give moderator rights to other people, etc.

    • maegul@lemmy.ml
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      11 months ago

      Yea, increasingly it seems ActivityPub and this fediverse is just a prototype. It’s quite realistic that in 10 years we won’t be looking back on it with huge amounts of praise, apart from proving that this general model can work, which is huge.

      I do wonder though, how would moderation work in true decentralisation. Who owns the community should the instance of its creator goes down? I guess user accounts would also be decentralised.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        11 months ago

        Yup. I’m messing around with decentralized services (e.g. IPFS and Iroh), and I think it would be really cool to have a completely decentralized service like lemmy. Some issues:

        • content would be immutable, so there would be no way to truly delete anything deterministically (would be up to clients)
        • following from the first, moderation would be an opt-in thing, so clients would need to enforce moderation changes themselves
        • performance would probably suck until the network gets bigger, so early adopters would have a rough time of it
        • searching could be complicated to implement, I need to think more about it

        I think it should be possible to implement the Lemmy API and just use IPFS/Iroh as a storage backend to get started, and slowly push the server bits to the client as the userbase gets bigger.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            11 months ago

            Awesome! I’ll need to put my thoughts together too at some point.

            I basically just want decentralized Lemmy, which I think makes the problem a lot easier to solve. If we ignore text search, I’d only need to fetch all child nodes given a parent mode, with an optional time limit. Everything is a simple entity with:

            • parent ID - null or user ID for communities, community ID for posts, and post/comment ID for comments
            • poster - user ID
            • content - text
            • content signature
            • number of pieces - for larger text posts

            I’m thinking of doing authentication with a blockchain mechanism, but I could use a handful of authentication servers instead. Your subscription info would be stored like any other entity, but encrypted.

            And I like your idea of pinning, I’ve seen that used as well. I want to come up with a novel way of distributing data, such that people geographically near you are more likely to have the content you’re interested in. I think Iroh is doing something similar, so I plan to see how they end up handling it, but that’s an optimization that wouldn’t be needed initially (could just use a naïve distributed hash table).

            Some issues:

            • content would be immutable, and thus could never be deleted; this has serious implications for users who are unaware, but I see it as a feature, not a bug
            • no control of what gets stored on your device; this is why it’s text only, but text can be controlled in some jurisdictions; maybe encrypting it at rest helps?
            • need some number of public servers to facilitate connections between people behind troublesome NAT

            So I’m watching Iroh development because I think they’ll have a lot of stuff in interested in using.