Pretty much in the title. Maybe you wouldn’t even use it, but would like to simply see it exist for the sake of having a federated alternative.
For me, it’d be the following:
- Meetup
- Tiktok
I am on the first two, but would prefer a federated alternative. I’m not on Tiktok, but would like to see a federated alternative.
I’ll admit these might not be a good idea. But as a thought experiment, I’d be curious about the community weigh in on what you all think this might look like.
Tiktok
The problem with video content (even short videos) is, that it generates an absurd amount of traffic and needs lots and lots of local data storage. This is also why there are so few PeerTube instances.
PeerTube would be a way to publish your short clips, too. Not as specialized as TikTok, but still …
Yeah the data is an issue for sure. I wonder if torrents of some kind would help making it more doable, where viewers (on computers, not phones) build up a cache from which they also seed. Like Spotify did when they started out.
I think the cache would also have to partially be on phones. If users are to ‘pay’ for using the network by caching/redistributing part of it, since most people access the web from phones
Same with Instagram. I’m a performer and rely on it for outreach and promotion but absolutely HATE the platform to no end. And this is a common sentiment among all performers. It is a garbage platform that comforts Nazis and pedophiles but bans the hashtag #horror and puts your account in jail for using it.
Unfortunately, PixelFed has almost no one on it and reaching a local audience is impossible, so there’s no point in switching. We have to go where the people are :(
There are hosting providers that offer unmetered bandwidth.
Sure, setup complexity is higher, but it is definitely doable.
I have thought about such a project as I also have access to relatively inexpensive 20gbps fiber, but lack the funding currently to do it.
Maybe one day…
This is why I expect the video side of things to be more on the level of stream channels that self-host content with subscriptions for access to VoDs, rather than singular big platforms. Streaming in of itself is a lot of traffic too, but you have much bigger RoI per bandwidth spent with live viewers, and you cut down the storage requirements with limited VoD access too.
The only problem then becomes discovering these channels from the rest of the federated space, but honestly, either that will be a problem that will be solved by the space in a more general manner (oooh, imagine the return of web rings! Lol) or… It will end up being an issue that doesn’t matter. Like right now, still coming from video games, MinnMax and Second Wind are two creator-owned platforms that appear to be relatively unpopular, with short amount of thousands of views, except they run off of donations on Patreons and the viewers they do have keep them afloat with a good decent margin.
Github
All the benefits of the network effect without the crippling reliance on a single MegaCorp to keep the lights on and not turn hostile like the owners of SourceForge, Reddit, and Freenode IRC.
Would also solve a problem I’m not hearing anyone at all talk about - what happens when the Gitlab / Gittea / whatever instances projects are hosting run out of money and go dark? Those sources are lost forever.
Gitlab is actively working on this.
That’s really great to hear! It’s an incredible vision for an open source future not dependent on MegaCorps, and I am SO here for that!
No more “alternatives” please. That formula has failed over and over again. We want software that can do what proprietary platforms do not pursue because it’s not profitable. Online spaces to build meaningful connections, have interesting conversations with like-minded people, discover new things, be free from trolls and toxicity, possibly without the guilt of polluting the hell out of this planet with hardware and excessive electricity consumption.
I would like discord but in fediverse. This one i am actually using and even there are foss alternative like nextcloud talk i would like something that is at least as reliable as discord for calls
Meetup. And I’d like to see nostr make a reddit clone. I love lemmy, I don’t love my identity being tied to an instance. A platform based on nostr’s protocol would solve that.
A dating website! Okcupid, POF, hinge, bumble, etc. All no longer even try to match people. Just pay for nothing.
that’s a great idea!
“Tiny knowledge projects”: https://observablehq.com/@jsomers/we-need-more-tiny-knowledge-projects-heres-one
Something like a decentralised dynamic web page like the one linked would be cool. But generally, stuff that’s more like “web gardens” where people can build “places” rather than feeds. Wikis being the best known successful example but still somewhat simple (in a good way).
A lot of the ideas presented on this thread are less applications for federation and more applications for blockchain of some kind. For example, wikipedia or uber eats replacement. Before you blindly downvote me for this suggestion, let me explain why.
In federation, you have servers which talk to each other. Users own their own accounts and there are multiple repositories of information. Lemmy is a repository of links and comments, each lemmy instance has its own repository. Mastodon is a repository of tweets, replies, and DMs. This works great. Everybody makes their own repository of information, and users can subscribe to any repository they like. They can also, via federation, access other repositories and “pull” or “push” data to them. That last sentence is the magic of federation you don’t get on platforms like Facebook. ActivityPub and federated platforms solve this problem of provider lock-in, at least partially.
This fediverse is not great when you need to establish a single repository of information that everybody in the network uses and is in sync for all users. Because it has no mechanism to arrive at consensus as to what should go into that authoritative repository. Even if all participants can be relied to act honorably (something the internet rarely provides), there will be disagreements about what should go into that repository. Edits may come in at different times, how do we resolve which edit goes “first”? Because it may make the second edit irrelevant, etc. Federation can’t solve this problem. ActivityPub can’t solve it and Nostr can’t solve it. But…
This is the exact problem blockchains solve: how can you establish a centralized repository of information (ledger) and administer it in a decentralized, P2P way where you can’t trust all participants to honestly participate? You cannot develop P2P systems which maintain a centralized repository of information without blockchain because no other P2P system has been able to solve this problem. There is no other mechanism of arriving at consensus and prevent sybil attacks.
Wikipedia? Centralized repository of information. Uber eats? Centralized repository of foods available, drivers, customers, and orders. eBay? same. And by the very nature of blockchains, they can also have an economic layer built into them which provides a means of exchange among participants. Useful for an eBay replacement, maybe less useful for a wikipedia replacement. Those means of exchange (“tokens”) can be used not just for transfer of funds, but also for things like building/scoring user reputation and incentivizing specific behaviors, especially if you want to incentivize behavior that is contrary to a user’s normal economic interest, such as providing a subsidy for restaurants on Uber who use more expensive, but more sustainable food packaging.
The non-P2P solution is to trust the administration of this centralized repository to a trusted authority. We trust wikipedia to administer articles and decide what ultimately goes in them. That system works fine for wikipedia, I’m not convinced we need a decentralized version.
There are many blockchains with various technical attributes which may work better or worse for solving these problems. They may use proof-of-work, proof-of-stake, etc. Some are more decentralized than others and have features like censorship resistance, privacy, smart contract, etc. But they solve this exact problem.
Isn’t the point of blockchain that it’s immutable? What about people who want to delete their own stuff? Or even mods or admins that have to delete stuff for legal reasons?
Immutability is not bad, there are some situations you want immutability. For example, to secure voting systems, you may want to be able to write on the chain that “precinct 156 reported votes x/y/z in this quantity” so that if anybody comes along and tampers with those numbers later on, you can point to the chain and say “no see, actually, these are the real original numbers that the precinct published”. The precinct could lie about their numbers of course and publish bad numbers to the chain, blockchain doesn’t protect against that (unless the votes themselves are recorded on the chain by the individual voter), but the blockchain protects against those numbers changing in the future or another party incorrectly claiming they are a/b/c when they are actually x/y/z. That’s a situation where immutability helps. Same with financial transactions. If you sent somebody money, you want a record of that (a receipt) if they later claim you never sent it to them. Examples of records which have a high degree of immutability that people use in everyday life are: court records, census data, house deeds, etc.
Blockchains usually have some degree of immutability but from a technical perspective they don’t necessarily have to. If we’re talking about data storage, you don’t have to store the data itself on the chain, the chain data can just “point to” off-chain data which you can take down or modify at will.
An example of a scenario where this could work is: you have a blockchain for coordinating the sharing of medical information between different parties. You, as a user, have an account on this blockchain. The only data stored on chain is a list of parties and who you have authorized to receive your medical data along with a pointer to a file storage system like Amazon AWS which contains your medical data in encrypted format. You can add or revoke authorization at any time by changing how that data is encrypted. Whoever you gave authorization to prior may have made a copy of the data at that point in time, but you can block them from accessing new data you put out. When Amazon AWS gets a request to transfer a copy of your data to a new party, they can check the blockchain to see if that party is authorized to receive it.
The benefit of such a system would be that:
- Your medical records are yours and stored in your own data storage system over which you have complete control.
- You can choose to share it with parties like insurance providers or researchers who need large medical data sets to comb through.
- You could set this control at a very granular level or grant access to all your data.
- Your data becomes portable between insurance providers and your insurance provider can’t make your life difficult by refusing to export data to your new one.
That’s useful for “real life” data, so to speak, stuff that should be immutable, save for a few occasions, like correcting errors; but my question was geared towards internet content. Taking your example of Wikipedia, if the service suffers from a wave of trolls, as it exists today, it can roll back the changes. With a blockchain? That’s significantly harder, especially if useful edits happened in the meantime.
There’s also this problem:
you don’t have to store the data itself on the chain, the chain data can just “point to” off-chain data which you can take down or modify at will.
Supposing this Wiki doesn’t store any of the content, then the endpoints become the targets, which beats the whole purpose of the blockchain resilience/immutability. An endpoint that can’t be reached is useless, one that has been compromised is even worse. You can trust the blockchain, but not the endpoint. And if the endpoint is where the “real stuff” is at anyway, why even bother with a blockchain?
Taking your example of Wikipedia, if the service suffers from a wave of trolls, as it exists today, it can roll back the changes. With a blockchain? That’s significantly harder, especially if useful edits happened in the meantime.
I’m not convinced we need a Wikipedia that runs on blockchain, but for the sake of it being an interesting question, I’ll answer it. Firstly, having a revision history is not bad. If you go to any wikipedia page, you can see most of the edits made, even those made by trolls, and the moderation decisions around those edits. This is good for transparency. When a user visits wikipedia, they see the “authoritative version” of that page, but the revision history is available to them if they want to read it. So with blockchain, you can roll back changes by changing which set of data is the “authoritative version” and you can have revision history, they are both important features.
There are a few types of data that are so harmful we can’t have them, even in the revision history. For this kind of problem, we reduce immutability (as referenced before by using pointers instead of storing data on-chain), or we can prevent that data from being put into the chain in the first place. An example of a way to do this is to require that every new block (every revision to a wikipedia page) be approved by a set of users who have reputation >x. Maybe that means a moderator has to sign off, or 10 regular users with at least one approved edit, you can set the threshold however you like and assign reputation however you’d like. As a user’s reputation is recorded on the blockchain, any node can easily verify their reputation amount.
Supposing this Wiki doesn’t store any of the content, then the endpoints become the targets, which beats the whole purpose of the blockchain resilience/immutability. An endpoint that can’t be reached is useless, one that has been compromised is even worse. You can trust the blockchain, but not the endpoint. And if the endpoint is where the “real stuff” is at anyway, why even bother with a blockchain?
The purpose of the blockchain in this wikipedia example is to:
- Establish a single authoritative version of wikipedia that the entire globe can see and submit edits to (unlike a federated version where you have multiple versions of wikipedia hosted different places). This is “single authoritative copy administered by people you can’t trust to be good actors” is the essential problem blockchain solves.
- Censorship resistance or resistance to “attackers” may not be an important thing for a wikipedia clone. Resistance to attack depends on your threat model, who the attackers are, what kind of resources they have, how you can resist those attacks, etc. Right now, Wikipedia is a single centralized entity and has done quite a good job at resisting attacks aimed to force them to make editorial decisions they don’t want to (mostly because of their reliance on the protections provided by the US legal system. If that system collapsed for some reason, their attack resistance might drop significantly). So if we clone wikipedia and make it decentralized, I think one could increase that security, but I’m not convinced that’s needed in the first place.
- It doesn’t matter if the data is ultimately stored at some endpoint, the blockchain is less about storage of data and more about arranging the data in order and establishing a single authoritative copy. It’s the medium through with users administer the data.
- “You can’t trust the endpoint”, this is true but maybe not in a way that matters. It’s true that the endpoint can send you bad information, but you can verify if the information is good or bad based on a cryptographic hash from the blockchain. Endpoints can have a reputational score on-chain and if they aren’t doing their job properly, they can cease being used as an endpoint at all. There could be multiple endpoints for any given piece of data for redundancy and to protect against a scenario where an end point, maliciously or not, becomes unreliable. Also, there are decentralized data storage options out there with varying degrees of usefulness for this application: torrents, IPFS, Filecoin, jstor, etc.
Deleting anything from the internet is theorically impossible, it shouldn’t a mandatory requirement for anything.
Instead you publish a deletion request that politely asks everyone to pretend it doesn’t exist
Whether it’s impossible is up for debate. Deleting your data from any social media or google-like platform is pretty much impossible. Deleting your old blogger that hasn’t been archived in any manner, perfectly doable.
There’s also the blatantly illegal stuff that is removed from the wider net whenever it’s found, like child abuse stuff. Imagine that kind of thing being available “forever” in a blockchain.
I meant in the sense that if someone got a copy while it was up, then it’s not really gone. Even if the statists try to exterminate all copies, they will probably fail.
After all, even the pirate bay is still reachable in the clearnet. There is stilln a long way to go before they can really stamp out thoughtcrime.
A video platform would be great. Like TikTok, or stories from Facebook, Insta or YT.
Some kind of marketplace like eBay.
Having bought and sold there the rules are quite arbitrary, and their cryptic algorhitm is a nuisance to buyers (you clicked by accident on a stove? You’re gonna see a ton of stoves in the recommended for a while!) and periodically harms sellers (if you don’t post daily and basically make it your day job, good luck making money!)
a federated alternative, with different instances for various interests and categories, meta-categories even and so on. Maybe regional instances like we have on here, one for the EU (quite convenient to ship and receive packages from inside of it, no customs wasting time and money) one for North America, one for East Asia, etc. With one being able to purchase from all of them.
Federation would also ensure that rules are properly enforced without abuses or other malpractices like eBay does (did you know eBay shipped a pig head to somebody who publicly criticized them?) since those instances would naturally be avoided and new ones would be made. It would also prevent excessive fees, as the fediverse is generally not a for-profit endeavor, and still, there will always be the option to shop around from other instances.
Google search. I want a way of finding stuff based on everyone’s tag suggestions, like a booru, but distributed.
Tiktok Youtube (there is peertube but it’s not as popular as YouTube)
Bandcamp
VRChat
Flickr
Because Instagram sucks, and Pixelfed isn’t really that amazing of a social media service despite having some great photography to gawk at.
I’d also like an alternative to Vimeo since not that many design agencies post their cool stuff on YouTube or even PeerTube (and I’m basically addicted to television branding).
