nimnews VS superhighway84

The issue with moderation is that not everyone agrees. Moderation should be plug-in and multilayer. Everyone should be able to choose which moderation they trust or distrust.

Full p2p is technically complicated and does not work well for small devices not always connected, we should keep servers to host the discussions.

The servers should be able to subscribe to a moderation. You don't want to host a discussion illegal in your country gor example. Users should also be able to move servers painlessly. If the users trust their servers with their identity, it does not need to use crypto for user identity. On your profile page on a server you can link other servers identity and that's enough and simpler.

If a discussion group is private, it should only be hosted in servers of their members and not elsewhere.

I started working on such a system https://github.com/mildred/nimnews but beyond the technical stuff I have no idea how this could gain adoption.

https://github.com/gravitl/netmaker

Honorable mention:

SuperHighway84 - more of a Usenet-inspired darknet, but I love the concept + the author's personal website:

https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84

While I do like the idea behind a P2P E2EE chat, I believe that unless you're willing to invest heavily into OrbitDB and IPFS, this project will stay niche at best.

The performance issues that come along with running OrbitDB/IPFS on a machine, let alone a mobile device, are still significant unfortunately. Adding Electron on top of what is already a heavy-weight application is probably going to make people's devices go brrrrr all the time. Not only that, but I would argue that for instant communication this stack might not be the best idea in terms of performance in first place.

Besides, the way IPFS has been (and still keeps) changing their dozens of libraries doesn't make development particularly smooth either. OrbitDB is always behind the latest IPFS version due to all these changes that are being introduced. Hence unless you're planning to allocate developer time on these two things as well, my guess is that you probably won't have too much fun with your back-end.

The integration with Tor is another thing that will likely be a time drain for developers, as other people here already pointed out, and that will lead to even more performance issues down the line.

Don't get me wrong, I really like the idea behind this project. However, I feel like the aspirations are unrealisticly high and the actual outcome might be realtively frustrating for the average end-user. Having that said, I would love my gut feeling to be proven wrong!

Disclaimer: I'm the developer of Superhighway84 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System#App..., https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84), a USENET-inspired, uncensorable, decentralized internet discussion system running on IPFS & OrbitDB.

Someone created a Usenet-like thing on IPFS. https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84

It's kind of dead. IIRC the dev put that on the back burner in favor of a new BBS-like app. https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem

If anybody wanted to, anybody could start a RLM SuperHighway84 where we could just talk about RLM stuff all day.

SuperHighway84 - Is this handy for organization? I like the usenet-style where it sorts itself if people use proper newsgroup names. If people used a 'youtube.channelname' format at least people could maybe scroll down to channels/videos people are talking about.

In my mind something like superhighway84 would be a better platform, then it's automatically organizing itself to some degree if people post in appropriate newsgroups. People looking for lost youtubers could post in youtube.channelName. That person looking for old VCDs & screeners could post in vcds.screeners.

SuperHighway84 is like a usenet style board where people can create whatever newsgroups they want. Anybody could start a 'Datahoarder' highway.

I like the idea of something like SuperHighway84 for talking about our collections. We could make one called YoutubeGraveyard or something. There's also r/DHExchange

Have you heard of SuperHighway84?