Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
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Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#2One decentralized project is willing to list alternative options, many past the 'create a prototype' stage:
https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/faq/misc/related.html
ZeroMe – Decentralized Microblogging on ZeroNet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15464156
An off-grid social network [Scuttlebutt] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049
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A recent discussion of building on IPFS, where a developer was honest about drawbacks:
OpenBazaar 2.0, powered by IPFS https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16702684
haven't solved the decentralized reputation problem and reviews can't entirely be trusted
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I am interested in this space because first mover advantage is still kind of up in the air until something works well enough to build a network advantage.
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#3One decentralized project is willing to list alternative options, many past the 'create a prototype' stage: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/faq/misc/related.html ZeroMe – Decentralized Microblogging on ZeroNet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15464156 An off-grid social network [Scuttlebutt] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049 -- A recent discussion of building on IPFS, where a developer was honest about dra…
Any thoughts on Mastodon[1][2]?
I think "federated" is the term for its model, moreso than "decentralized" (?).
[1] https://joinmastodon.org [2] https://instances.social/list/old
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#4Awesome post! I think a ton of people are coalescing on this idea - I’ve seen multiple people post thoughts around this very recently. I’m about to launch a distributed social network, built on ethereum and ipfs. Ethereum helps solve some of these distributed discovery issues. It includes an open source, centralized ‘gateway server’, which makes it a little easier for onboarding, plus it has built in support for ActivityPub out of the box, which makes it compatible with mastodon. I’m posting it here on Monday morning! Sorry for the self plug. I love your ideas around deleting content - that’s a tough problem that I’m only really supporting on the client side right now.
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#5One decentralized project is willing to list alternative options, many past the 'create a prototype' stage: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/faq/misc/related.html ZeroMe – Decentralized Microblogging on ZeroNet https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15464156 An off-grid social network [Scuttlebutt] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14050049 -- A recent discussion of building on IPFS, where a developer was honest about dra…
Any thoughts on Mastodon[1][2]? I think "federated" is the term for its model, moreso than "decentralized" (?). [1] https://joinmastodon.org [2] https://instances.social/list/old
That's the right word.
(General note)
Federated is a bit different from decentralised. For example, email is federated, but not decentralised. In a federated network, if "your service providing server" is down (like gmail.com), then you don't have service, though others on other parts of the network would continue to have service. With a decent sized network, there is no "your service providing server" and other machines can take over when one fails. Decentralisation always goes along with redundancy whereas federation doesn't require redundancy.
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#6Why not just pay a few bucks a month for a social network, and get all the benefits of centralization without the evils of ad-supported corporations? Most of us here use and trust GitHub, and imho that's what we need more of.
While I'm a huge supporter of blockchain projects and their allies, in the case of social networks I don't see how this is going to turn out any differently than FOAF.
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#7Why not just pay a few bucks a month for a social network, and get all the benefits of centralization without the evils of ad-supported corporations? Most of us here use and trust GitHub, and imho that's what we need more of. While I'm a huge supporter of blockchain projects and their allies, in the case of social networks I don't see how this is going to turn out any differently than FOAF.
Because not all of my friends and family are willing to pay a subscription fee :-/
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#8I made something similar to what's described in the article: https://static.network (https://github.com/olivernyc/static)
It's an IPFS based social network, running entirely in the browser. Posts are JSON objects of content and metadata, with links to the previous post and the author's profile. Currently updates are propagated over a single pubsub channel, so it only works for real time communication. I plan to replace this with IPNS once it is implemented in js-ipfs.
Long term, I want to implement a web of trust to facilitate search, discovery and spam control. Here's some good reading about how this might be done without central authorities: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/stories/using-trust-in-open-netwo...
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any thoughts on Mastodon[1][2]? I think "federated" is the term for its model, moreso than "decentralized" (?). [1] https://joinmastodon.org [2] https://instances.social/list/old
That's the right word. (General note) Federated is a bit different from decentralised. For example, email is federated, but not decentralised. In a federated network, if "your service providing server" is down (like gmail.com), then you don't have service, though others on other parts of the network would continue to have service. With a decent sized network, there is no "your service providing server" and other mach…
You're thinking of distributed. Decentralized is broader than that. Really anything that isn't centralized like Facebook is.
Obviously a lot of this is very squishy and overlaps a lot even within the same system.
Look at DNS. It's nominally a centrally-rooted hierarchy, but the root is operated by consensus rather than monarchy, so how do you classify that? Then each domain can be operated by a separate organization, so essentially federated but not exactly because it's still a hierarchy. Meanwhile the recursive resolvers and caches are fully distributed -- use any of them and the results are (supposed to be) the same.
Re: Blueprint of a distributed social network on IPFS, and its problems
#10There is a distributed (blockchain based) social network today: steemit.com. Several of the frontends (like busy.org) use IPFS for content distribution, as the Steem blockchain only holds text and json.