Just wanted to ask your opinion before I waste too much time in a new open source project that nobody wants.
Lemmy, Mastodon and Co are federated but users are concentrated on a few large instances which somewhat contradicts the original idea.
What do you think of a truly decentralised app where each instance is one user.
I am aware that there many reasons why this is a bad idea but I would like to hear from you why I should leave it, or encourage me to try it out.
For Lemmy and PieFed much of the server load comes from communities, not users. It’s communities that do the activity fan out, not users.
You should check out Nostr and its keypair and relays architecture
Thank you, will look into it.
Gotosocial is basically that.
I ended up going with akkoma for my instance, its not just for single user setups but its simpler then mastodon with more customizability.
Nostr is also something you might want to look into, its a pretty neat system.
You may want to lookup Freenet(Hyphanet) first.
The difficulty is always groups, trustworthiness, and what to do when people are offline.
The main problem here is persistance. Most users are on machines that get turned off. I could kinda see it for chat. If you think about walkie talkies people on on or not. A chat where each instance was a user would be like that. You get on and participate or not. CB’s even have channels yeah.
The main problem here is persistance. Most users are on machines that get turned off.
This! It only works if you have a server that’s online 24/7. Can be a VPS in a data centre, can be some Raspberry Pi running at your home with a DNS name pointing to it.
I did not mean to run locally. Every user has to deploy somewhere (like Hetzner) with public domain, tls, etc. Deployment should be simplified with a single command. But still the user has to create an account, buy a domain and needs to be somewhat familiar with command line.
Sounds like a good idea if you want to have around 5 active users.
Sorry for the sarcasm but I don’t like the idea that only people privileged with a VPS can join.
No worries :) it is very likely true. Alternatively I could think of a managed option where each user has an instance in a separate container with separate sqlite database and with different subdomain.
I think the idea is perfectly fine and if you want to learn more about these apps and about designing decentralized architecture then you should try it out!
I’m personally a fan of the “dumb pipe smart endpoint” microservice style of approach.
It does have client/server separation but allows all processing, authentication, etc to be done on the users device with servers basically acting as relays for routing that cant access any actual information and Id love to see it used more but for a variety of non-technical reasons, I doubt it
If your interested I’d love to chat more about either of these concepts :v
This is basically what nostr is/does
I have built a network that can be used for that, the tenfingers sharing network. It’s completely decentralised, and each user can host or share its own webpage/presence.
HMU if you try something.
PS. It solves ‘the offline user’ among other things, and would be perfect for a distributed social network.
This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing!
