Comment on Plebbit is a peer-to-peer Reddit alternative that allows you to self host and own your own community
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days agoYou could do the same with DNS, nothing is stopping you from registering a similar domain name and doing the exact same thing. ENS doesn’t change anything with the attack, it merely exchanges registrars for a block chain.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 5 days ago
Except dns requires proper registration, and has a place to report abuse, and those reports are actually acted upon. Moderation here is not preventative, it’s reactive.
Stop trying to justify this approach, a blockchain is cool but you’re really just monopolizing domain registration
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Oh, I think the approach is problematic, I just don’t think ENS is a major concern here. I don’t think you need DNS/ENS for this kind of service, nor do you need any form of blockchain.
Boomkop3@reddthat.com 5 days ago
Accurate, what would you do instead of dns though?
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
Nothing?
DNS exists to give an authoritative answer for who owns something. I would have a completely different design where nobody owns communities.
Basically, I’d treat communities as topics that live on a DHT as keys, posts would be keys semantically related to the community (e.g. “communities.<community>.posts.<post>”), and so on. Anyone can post to that topic or to any posts or comments related to that topic by creating subkeys, all of which use UUIDs to guarantee uniqueness. All entries in the hash table are signed by the author’s key, and people can create identical entries (i.e. the same key), which can be distinguished by the signature. The signature is important, because we can’t trust timestamps to distinguish between collisions (e.g. someone mimicking someone else’s post id vs someone editing their own post).
Moderation consists of a web of trust system, where users are given weights based on how much you trust them. When deciding whether to display a post, you’ll check the moderation of that post by people you trust, and show/hide it accordingly. The same goes for votes, you could disregard votes from users you consider spammers/trolls. Building that moderation graph is largely automatic, if you vote or moderate similarly to someone else, you start to trust them more, and their weight in your graph increases.
In other words, nobody owns communities, so there’s no reason to have DNS, and the main reason to have DNS is for moderation, which becomes moot when moderation is itself distributed.