• sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I think both kinda suck, so I’m making my own that’s completely distributed instead of federated. That way hosting costs are near zero (just need some P2P nodes and a download server) and scaling to higher user counts should be automatic if I build it right.

    The problem is that building it right is hard, and I don’t have a ton of time.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Not yet, but I’ll definitely post something when I get to a point where I’m ready to share the code. I definitely want it to be open source, I just want enough functionality there so the long term vision is clear.

        But here’s some details of what I’m trying to achieve:

        • web of trust-based moderation - no “mods,” only metadata from people you trust (upvotes, downvotes, blocks, etc)
        • all storage on devices of users of the service - the more storage you provide, the better your experience; your preferred communities have first priority, but everyone stores something random from the service
        • text posts only, at least to start - images/videos need to be hosted elsewhere

        I’m building it initially as a desktop app, but I’ll port it later to mobile and maybe web (still trying to figure out how web would work; maybe some notion of instances?).

        I’m hoping to bridge to lemmy with an ActivityPub service to get content, but I’m not working on that until the above is ready.

        • ThePinkUnicorn@lemdro.id
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          9 months ago

          This sounds interesting, but how do you plan on stopping illegal content being stored on users devices? If there is any chance a user could unknowingly be hosting illegal content that could lead to some very big issues.

          • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            Still working on that, but I have some ideas:

            • text only - images, videos, and other binary content must be stored elsewhere (could still have links though)
            • data is stored encrypted (user option) - wouldn’t show up in scans
            • clear separation between “stuff I’m interested in” and “random stuff I’m hosting for the network” - plausible deniability
            • perhaps an option to opt out of random data storage - you’d still store stuff you’re interested in

            But yeah, that’s a huge part of why I’m unwilling to share the code until I’m comfortable with the moderation engine. I think there’s an opportunity to use that moderation engine to reduce storage of CSAM (i.e. don’t store data from blocked users).