Would blockchain work better for the Fediverse, instead of Email Style Instances?

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Teknevra@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

cross-posted from: lemmy.world/post/40568658

I recently came across three separate platforms:

Qortal: qortal.org

ZeroNet: zeronet.io

and

Plebbit: 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.

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?

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deadsuperhero@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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.

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Cochise@lemmy.eco.br ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
No.

To have a decentralised network, you need a lot of servers storing some data and a access algorithm thar searches for the pieces. There are a lot of hard problems:

you need various copies because each node can go offline any moment. This works for pirated DVDs, but not for social media posts.

you need to store a lot of the network in each node. The user needs to contribute to the network. Few people will donate GBs of storage and bandwidth to use a social network. You will get only a few enthusiasts.

search is a nightmare nobody have really solved.

The architecture is good for storing and distributing many copies of a few very popular contents (and shines in torrent) but is bad for storing, searching for, and accessing many unpopular and mildly popular contents.
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6nk06@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Better how?

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lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
The blockchain is always a scam.

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gtr@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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 torrent style should be enough.

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atrielienz@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Can I ask what you’re planning to use block chain for? To verify each account? Or to federate instances?

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wizard@lemmynsfw.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
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 holos.social is a super interesting idea.

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