I recently came across three separate platforms:
Qortal: https://qortal.org/
ZeroNet: https://zeronet.io/
and
Plebbit: https://plebbit.com/
That all claim to be completely decentralized.
There’s even talk about how Plebbit is more decentralized than the Fediverse, because the Fediverse is based off of instances.
https://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/s/0ynXzrD5H6
And I was curious, would such a setup work better for the Fediverse, or is it basically just a huge scam/waste of time and money?
Blockchain is a bad choice for a social network, it’s expensive and all data is public. But since we’re talking about decentralization, let’s make a rough comparison.
Bitcoin: 24229 nodes (source: https://bitnodes.io/)
Fediverse: 30005 nodes (source: https://fedilist.com/)Most of blockchain networks are much smaller than Bitcoin, so they don’t even come close to the Fediverse in terms of decentralization.
Some people here already don’t like that they can’t know if something they deleted is gone, or that literally anyone can see anything they do here.
This would just destroy anyone’s concept of data ownership and control. Which I kinda like.
But pire peer-to-peer distributed systems like this, mean you need to locally store everything you may want to see or read, or ever have. Which is not possible for most
I’d need to read through their docs to sift how they do their alleged decentralization. But if those sites work as portals where you create an account and use through there, then I don’t think they’d be much different from ActivityPub.
Now, if there’s a way for you to have a site-less instance (IP, hash or signature-based, maybe?), then I could see how it becomes more decentralized. Or if they’d do, from what I could understand, as PieFed, where you can apparently change ownership of communities across instances, which despite not being as decentralized as the previous proposal as I understand, it would still be more than it usually is in ActivityPub.
They aren’t scams, they are tech nerds trying to re-invent another wheel. Plebbit looked the strongest to me imho but advertising a 4chan clone as your top site on the chain/torrent network will raise alarm bells with most folks.
The two main problems I see with these approaches:
- Chain-based: lots of cpu and inter-node traffic for what? Guarenteeing you’re seeing the current version of the site? meh
- Torrent-based: quirky, less popular sites will have less peers and you may be waiting forever to see the site.
Not really doing it for me at all to be honest.
Blockchain.
'Nuff said. 😂
