Since being on Lemmy I feel like I finally found a place I can consider more similar to my home on the web… I feel like this is the real decentralized web, not the next capitalism nightmare which is the so called “web3”…

Give me some guidance! How is the federation thing going? What are some cool projects I need to know about? I know Lemmy, Friendica, Matrix, Bookwyrm, Mastodon, but I’m sure there’s more!

85 points
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Federated Github? That’s… git.

Federated browsers? Federated hosting providers?

I’m beginning to think you might not fully understand what federated means.

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17 points

Maybe just decentralized i am guessing. Like that would just be open source browsers. Not sure for hosting though.

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29 points

No dammit. I want my browsing activity mixed in with 5,000 other peoples. Am I logging in to my bank or yours? That’s the fun! Nobody knows!

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14 points

That’s true anonymous browsing, not only does the browser not know who you are when you visit a website, but you also don’t know what account you are logging into.

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13 points
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Federated Github? That’s… git.

Github is a forge with features like issues, pull requests, project planning, documentation, project sites, and automation, so not really.

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5 points

You’re right. I was thinking more along the distribution side only.

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12 points

There’s also https://forgefed.org/

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3 points

Forgejo is implementing federation

Interesting!

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9 points

Why not give a crash course for OP? As I understand it, Federation is just one standard of protocol that can communicate across servers. I think OP is referring to Federated here as both the protocol and the movement away from platforms. I think this is a valid part of growing both Federated protocols, and protocols in general as an alternative to big-tech platforms. The major platforms DO offer hosting in a way. People host their photos libraries on Facebook and Instagram. So a non-platform alternative may interest some.

For hosting - get a private VPS and run your own cloud services. Explore RSS for news feeds, a super OG protocol that podcast feeds still use I think.

Web browsers shouldn’t be federated because the idea there is privacy, security, and ad blocking.

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3 points

You can probably host a feed reader & a few other things at home on old hardware & a budget. Paying $5 USD a month on hosting is too much for many people.

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2 points

Web Browsers are all federated because they communicate with each other over a common standard.

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36 points

What are some cool projects I need to know about?

Email, usenet

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4 points

IRC

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29 points

Internet is already federated, its just called peering instead?

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19 points
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Forgejo is working on federated github.

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4 points

I think of sourcehut has already-federated git hosting because to send the equivalent of a pull request instead of making an account you send patches via email using git’s built-in email workflow. Email is federated, therefore that is federated git collaboration.

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3 points

The whole workflow and philosophy of sourcehut is so different than GitHub though. I think a lot more people would be interested in GitHub, but federated.

There’s also this which some people may care about.

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16 points
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Federated browsers

That’s literally just regular browsers, you can interact with any one of billions of webservers

Federated github

Git is federated by nature, you can add as many remotes as you wish and push/pull to all of them. Add in a mailing list for issue tracking and “pull requests” (patch submissions) and you’re golden. You can look up sourcehut to self-host a well-integrated combination of the two.

Federated hosting providers

Not sure what exactly you mean by this but maybe take a look at IPFS, although it’s more P2P then federation.

Federated internet

Internet is already fairly federated by nature - most commonly used protocols in the OSI stack are open and you can host your own components of critical infrastructure. Getting others to interact with them might be difficult due to security & privacy issues.

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2 points

github is not just about git though.

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1 point

Yep, but the rest can mostly be replaced with a mailing list. Or, if you’re allergic to email, there’s also https://forgejo.org/.

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1 point

I’m not allergic to emails, I use them a lot, but I think a mailing list is not a federated github, but a mess.

Forgejo is a much better choice in my opinion.

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