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.
I am thinking about what you describe since 2017 and have written a few words about it lately (just posted them, so shameless self-plug here): https://beyermatthias.de/a-distributed-social-network
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.
