• 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.