cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/40568658
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?
Nope! The main thing going for a distributed ledger would be global consistency, but there are some very negative downsides. It’s slow, scales poorly, puts a massive burden on admins operating instances, and the blocks would be effectively immutable…meaning that if the contents of each activity were fully nested inside of a block, edits or deletions would be impossible. We already see problems with CSAM showing up in various blockchains, and a Fediverse blockchain used for social purposes would be no different.
It’s just not the right tool for the job when it comes to social networks. There were a few early experiments in this area, such as Twister, which tried to build a Twitter clone on top of a blockchain using DHT. It has a huge list of limitations, though, and development stopped around 2020.
Can I ask what you’re planning to use block chain for? To verify each account? Or to federate instances?
Better how?
I’m totally in favor of a fully distributed solution! But you don’t need a ledger for it, neither centralized nor distributed. A simple pub-sub + DHT, torrent style, should be enough.
Blockchain is the wrong solution for that problem.
Check out Nostr, its’s pretty much what we need.
Blockchain does not mean decentralized. There are completely centralized blockchains, and there are completely decentralized systems without blockchains (like Tor).
Centralization is as much a human problem as it is technical, that’s why everyone joins mastodon.social instead of looking for a smaller instance or spinning up their own.
As for a more decentralized Fediverse, I think https://holos.social/ is a super interesting idea.



