Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets funding for development

Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by toomuchtodo on Saturday June 27, 2020 @06:00PM (#23665016)

> The answer, of course, is that these people should build their own cities. But first, of course, they'll just have to build their own websites, servers, datacentres, ISPs, and nations.

Yeah! I’m proposing building systems on top of Reddit and Hacker News (just two examples, any forum really that serves its data as http) to backfill their content and discussion data (comments), and prevent global censorship by mod actions. If you can’t censor The Pirate Bay and SciHub, you’d expect such a system to be equally durable. It’s all JSON blobs, identifies, and endpoints.

These sites are temporary (remember Digg?), so you want to build discussion systems that are durable, prevent censorship, and will outlive their underlying websites they sit on top of. These are not unreasonable amounts of data we’re dealing with, it’s mostly compressible text. I can store 100TB in Backblaze for $500/month, and front it from VMs around the world.

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Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by antepodius on Saturday June 27, 2020 @06:06PM (#23665053)

Good luck! We do need something more robust than individual company-owned websites. My optimistic side hopes that when we get good enough protocols for this sort of thing entrenched, things will stay good.

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Re:Lemmy, an open-source federated Reddit alternative, gets ... by toomuchtodo on Saturday June 27, 2020 @06:15PM (#23665103)

I’m hopeful. The Distributed Web movement appears to have legs and momentum. Time will tell if it delivers the aspirational value supporters believe in.

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