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.
Like, one of those sites where you rate the hotness
Wikipedia.
Does everything need to be federated? I don’t quite see the appeal of a ‘federated’ Wikipedia. It’s not really social-oriented and you can already export all the pages and rehost it yourself.
I don’t know the details on how to rehost wikipedia by myself, and also how to search and access unofficial wikipedia servers either. If this is all common knowlege for internet users, I am seriously lagging behind here. But maybe you are right and there really is no universal appeal for this, and overall people just prefer to see wikipedia as a single entity. But I think there would be benefits in federating wikipedia. Basically it becomes harder to take down information, and allows us to bypass wikipedia’s own strictness and bias. I know there are wikipedia alternatives but I would like to be able to access different view points seamlessly in the same platform, just like it happens here.
There is a nostr app working on this. It’s not very far along but it’s an interesting idea https://wikistr.com/
I would like to see something that is less focussed on social media and more on building something together like Wikipedia. One thing that comes to mind would be mapping out all political statements along with arguments and evidence to support or falsify them and the relationships between them (e.g. “if you believe x is a big problem in society and you believe y is the perfect form of government then you must believe y solves x”).
A lot of our political discussions seem quite repetitive and go in circles because each argument is presented in a very shallow way. Something to counteract that would be welcome and I think it could work quite well in a federated way since people with different political views would probably want to contribute the supporting and that falsifying sides for each statement.
You might like a website called Kialo. It’s a tool for structured public debates
That would go to shit immediately. The sheer level of moderation that would be required to prevent that from being abused and corrupted would be insane, and then that kind of moderation would in turn invalidate the whole project because the moderation itself would have its own biases.
But it especially wouldn’t work in a federated space. Are you suggesting that people can just open their own instance of that? If there are multiple different instances for this kind of thing, that’s even more abusable.
Part of the reason Wikipedia works is it is centralized, relatively neutral, and you need sources on facts. It’s run by people that adhere to a strict standard, and everyone that contributes is required to adhere to that exact same standard.
What would be the scholarly criteria for the sort of thing that you’re talking about? What is the standard? And how do you enforce that standard in a federated space?
Because if it’s anything like how federation works around Lemmy, there can be no standard. Instances are going to do whatever they like based on the biases of each admin, which undermines the entire concept.
You’re trying to apply objectivity to a very subjective area. I’m not saying it’s impossible, and you should by all means try it, but maybe it would be a good idea to try something that has a better chance, first, such as this:
How about an open platform for scientific review and tracking? Like, whenever a new discovery or advance is announced, that site would cut through the hype, report on peer review, feasibility, flaws in methodology, the ways in which it’s practical and impractical, how close we are to actual usage (state of clinical trials, demonstrated practical applications, etc.)
And it would keep being updated, somewhat like Wikipedia, as more research occurs. It needs a more robust system of review to avoid the problems that Wikipedia has, and I don’t have the solution for that, but I believe there’s got to be a way to do it that’s resistant to manipulation.
Basically a living survey paper. Examine.com does a very good job of this for a very small set of the scientific literature. The problem is that it takes a lot of work to do, few people are qualified to do it, and out of those few, even fewer will have the time to make such contributions.
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?
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.
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?
YouTube I know some peer to peer stuff exists but I haven’t checked it out. Not sure how federation would come into play
