I was talking to a friend who was thinking about the internet we want to have, decentralized, less silos, a bit like the nineties where it was possible to have static pages, host email, write your own CGI scripts, and it was all step by step easy and possible if that was what you wanted. And we got talking about the kind of things we need to today to get this back. Do you have reading suggestions? Blogs to read? Projects? People to follow?
@kensanata You can follow @aral if it's not already the case.
@skiant @kensanata Hey Alexes :) Have you looked into https://datproject.org?
@aral @skiant Just a little bit. As far as I understand it, it builds a Merkle tree and that seems to lead to two properties I dislike: you can’t delete old revisions and so how do you deal with unwanted content in old revisions? And you always get the full “repo” if you download a blog, for example. How will that scale, over the years? It feels like bitcoin where you have to download all the transactions since forever if you want to trust the current status.
@kensanata @skiant Hey Alex, it does use a directed acyclic graph/merkle tree but it isn’t a blockchain. It tombstones and garbage collects deleted content but afaik, not from revision history (see https://github.com/beakerbrowser/specs/issues/12 – I was confused about this also). Regarding always getting the full repo: you don’t have to do a full replication, DAT supports sparse archives and replication.
@aral @kensanata @skiant Afterall the great gift of free software is to allow everyone to build on the work that came before them without asking for permission.
I wouldn't have gotten anywhere in Odysseus without WebKit, SQLite, GNOME & elementary.
@aral @skiant @kensanata Is this anything like IPFS?
@aidalgol @skiant @kensanata Take IPFS and remove the VC-funded organisation that builds it (https://protocol.ai/team/) and replace it with a nonprofit organisation (https://codeforscience.org/about) and yes, somewhat (also: far more focussed and doing things for the right reasons).
@skiant @kensanata I’m still early in my process of learning the protocol/ecosystem but it does 99% of what I need and I’d much rather learn it and try to contribute than recreate the wheel (especially given that I’m about 1/10th as clever as Mathias and the rest of the DAT crew) ;)