• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year 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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        1 year 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.