Anyone interested in discussing a Lemmy/Reddit alternative? - Lemmy.World
lemmy.world
This is still very much early-days, but I’m thinking about building a distributed link aggregator. Some notes: - no servers (all P2P) except to connect peers - no “instances” so everything is in one namespace (so like reddit /r/community, not lemmy instance/c/community) - everyone is a moderator - moderation based on a web of trust type system - desktop first, mobile/web later - web would require servers, mobile may have platform-specific issues - no plans to integrate with fediverse, but could be possible - initial intent is to be text-only - file storage could be supported later in an opt-in basis (for now, just link to an external img host), but I’m worried about disk storage since there’s no central data lake and everyone needs to chip in some storage space Some technical details: - written in Rust and ReactJS - Tauri-based - uses Iroh [https://iroh.computer/] for data synchronization - looking into Appleseed [https://github.com/cblgh/appleseed-metric] and maybe TrustNet [https://github.com/cblgh/trustnet] for moderation Current status: - rewrote Appleseed and part of TrustNet to Rust for perf testing last weekend (Rust is waaay faster) - will probably rewrite again once I finish reading the paper (current code is a direct port) - have basic Tauri+Iroh app, but it’s a glorified chat app w/ no syncing between peers (a peer can join a chat, but will lose access if the host goes down) - reading source code for SimpleX [https://simplex.chat/] (re-learning Haskell too) - could be interesting for DMs or something I’m not sure how long I’ll work on this, but I’ll probably release some libraries under a relatively liberal license, so something like LGPL at the most stringent, but probably Apache/MIT (depends on if I need to clean-room the appleseed implementation). So, if there’s interest here, I’m happy to post updates for discussion periodically.

The link goes to a related post on another community so I don’t have to duplicate it here.

Basically, I’d like to discuss tech options for a Reddit/Lemmy alternative. Here’s what I’ve found:

  • Iroh - early days alternative to IPFS promising improved performance and application control
  • Appleseed - old-ish proposal for a distributed trust system - I’m thinking of using it for moderation (i.e. if you block/report similarly to someone else, that will get automated; you could also explicitly trust someone else [e.g. a CP-detector bot])
  • TrustNet - builds on Appleseed - still reading through the paper to know what it adds over Appleseed, if anything

Goals:

  • distributed storage - worried the fediverse will scale poorly (become too expensive)
  • distributed moderation - power-hungry mods suck
  • local-first - cache/host stuff you care about, reserve some space for preservation

Non-goals:

  • make money - it’s a hobby for now, everything would be FOSS
  • image/video hosting - legal issues if you get random CP or something
  • preserve all data - I’d rather sacrifice older/less popular content than lose users - community can run caching servers
  • fediverse compat - P2P makes that difficult, but a bridge should be feasible

Thoughts? What am I missing?

Also, would anyone like me to post updates? It’ll mostly be stuff from my research, if I post code, it won’t be for a while (I have limited time).

    • sugar_in_your_teaOP
      2·
      4 months ago

      Not yet, I don’t release projects until they’re useful for others with just the documentation provided, and I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus due to family vacations and whatnot.

      I do have a private git repo I’m working in, and I’ll make it public once it’s usable. I have basic infrastructure set up and multiple clients can communicate, but they don’t yet share the full state. Next steps are:

      1. Clients should be able to connect and sync the full state by just fetching differences
      2. Some basic level of moderation - planning for something like a web of trust, but with transitive, fractional trust
      3. Stress testing and a rapid rollout plan for relays (needed to connect peers); I have one relay, but I’ll probably need a swarm if it gets any kind of traction

      It’ll probably take a few months of work to get there, but I have the basics of 2 in the works, and I think the library I’m using for 1 is going to get a 1.0 release soonish, so I might delay until then. Things that won’t work when I launch:

      • web - it’ll be a desktop only app, but the client is built in tauri, so web may be an option eventually
      • mobile - tauri’s mobile support is still in beta, so I won’t launch with that (and it’s a lot of work getting releases going)
      • non-text posts - only links or text are supported, markdown works too
      • fediverse bridge - I’d like to build this, but I don’t understand ActivityPub well enough to just jump in yet

      Anyway, I’ll post on a few places once it’s ready. Maybe by the end of the year, by probably not.