Since being on Lemmy I feel like I finally found a place I can consider more similar to my home on the web… I feel like this is the real decentralized web, not the next capitalism nightmare which is the so called “web3”…
Give me some guidance! How is the federation thing going? What are some cool projects I need to know about? I know Lemmy, Friendica, Matrix, Bookwyrm, Mastodon, but I’m sure there’s more!
Federated browsers
That’s literally just regular browsers, you can interact with any one of billions of webservers
Federated github
Git is federated by nature, you can add as many remotes as you wish and push/pull to all of them. Add in a mailing list for issue tracking and “pull requests” (patch submissions) and you’re golden. You can look up sourcehut to self-host a well-integrated combination of the two.
Federated hosting providers
Not sure what exactly you mean by this but maybe take a look at IPFS, although it’s more P2P then federation.
Federated internet
Internet is already fairly federated by nature - most commonly used protocols in the OSI stack are open and you can host your own components of critical infrastructure. Getting others to interact with them might be difficult due to security & privacy issues.
Not federated, but distrubuted github https://radicle.xyz/
If you want decentralized private messaging see https://delta.chat/
federated browser
Do you mean something like CENO Browser and TOR Browser?
Didn’t know about CENO, it looks super cool! Might have to dig more into TOR as well
We have federated countries
(well… its more like… confederated rather than federated ¯_(ツ)_/¯)
And there’s Brair there are Brair Public Forums. There is no censorship. But activity is quite dead. Expect to see a post every month, or longer.
I was interested, but I can’t click to visit any of the forums.
You have to create a Briar profile in the app, then go to “Request Forums” on the webpage copy paste their link and add them, and you also have to copy paste your link and put it on the webpage in the blank space where is says “Enter your Briar Link”
Peertube (Youtube-like) and Loops (Tiktok-like) and Pixelfed (Instagram-like Photosharing service) are growing.
Federated Github? That’s… git.
Federated browsers? Federated hosting providers?
I’m beginning to think you might not fully understand what federated means.
Federated Github? That’s… git.
Github is a forge with features like issues, pull requests, project planning, documentation, project sites, and automation, so not really.
You’re right. I was thinking more along the distribution side only.
Why not give a crash course for OP? As I understand it, Federation is just one standard of protocol that can communicate across servers. I think OP is referring to Federated here as both the protocol and the movement away from platforms. I think this is a valid part of growing both Federated protocols, and protocols in general as an alternative to big-tech platforms. The major platforms DO offer hosting in a way. People host their photos libraries on Facebook and Instagram. So a non-platform alternative may interest some.
For hosting - get a private VPS and run your own cloud services. Explore RSS for news feeds, a super OG protocol that podcast feeds still use I think.
Web browsers shouldn’t be federated because the idea there is privacy, security, and ad blocking.
You can probably host a feed reader & a few other things at home on old hardware & a budget. Paying $5 USD a month on hosting is too much for many people.
Web Browsers are all federated because they communicate with each other over a common standard.
There’s also https://forgefed.org/
Forgejo is implementing federation
Interesting!
Maybe just decentralized i am guessing. Like that would just be open source browsers. Not sure for hosting though.
No dammit. I want my browsing activity mixed in with 5,000 other peoples. Am I logging in to my bank or yours? That’s the fun! Nobody knows!
That’s true anonymous browsing, not only does the browser not know who you are when you visit a website, but you also don’t know what account you are logging into.
Sometimes I don’t even know who I am while I’m browsing.
This is a fun thing I found, wish they had an android app or something.
What are some cool projects I need to know about?
Email, usenet
IRC
There’s only like 20 some federated projects. I recommend you read into FOSS, self hosting, and Linux as this is what most of us are into and is along the same lines
Internet is already federated, its just called peering instead?
How about a federated dildo.
Since Git can already be federated (no MS GitHub required), take a look at Darcs & Pijul for a better version control model based on Patch Theory. Tooling needs help, but fundamentals are sound.
Everything in the XMPP world is worth checking out. Movim is one of the more interesting projects bring a social media option to the platform & pushing boundaries for clients that is cool to see—as well as Libervia for setting up communities.
Forgejo is working on federated github.
I think of sourcehut has already-federated git hosting because to send the equivalent of a pull request instead of making an account you send patches via email using git’s built-in email workflow. Email is federated, therefore that is federated git collaboration.
The whole workflow and philosophy of sourcehut is so different than GitHub though. I think a lot more people would be interested in GitHub, but federated.
There’s also this which some people may care about.
A few I’ve been interested in.
- I just saw this project literally today, a federated search engine using web rings - https://gitlab.com/Doomsdayrs/mengzi
- Ibis is a federated wiki by the Lemmy dev - https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis
- WriteFreely is a simple federated blog designed around writing - https://github.com/writefreely/writefreely
- Funkwhale for music hosting (I’m sure I heard rumours about it stopping development but it still seems active?) - https://dev.funkwhale.audio/funkwhale/funkwhale
One I’m surprised I haven’t seen (although might inappropriate for the standard, no idea) is an activitypub messenging service like Matrix
The developer of Pixelfed - an Instagram-alike (and now Loops.video - a TikTok like platform) announced that he is working on an ActivityPub messaging service called “Sup.” There’s nothing else really known about it except that he’s developing it. AP would actually work fairly well as a messaging protocol aside from the lack of end-to-end encryption, but that too is being worked on.
I thought I had heard about him making that before but no amount of searching seemed to find it… I guess thats why, I was thinking I had just made it up or something.
I know how that is! Seems like I’m constantly wondering if I just made this or that up. 🤷🏻♂️
