IPFS is the solution to big tech censorship but the barrier to entry seems high

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#1

Don’t get me wrong I like IPFS and have a growing repository that I want to create some sort of page for. We must move away from centralized content providers for the good of all free thinking people that see what is happening at this very moment when it comes to censorship voices that are counter to the main stream facebook/twitter/google narrative.

I have a technical background but I just don’t understand some very basic things about IPFS. With several projects going I’m finding that I may not have the skill or time to be able to dedicate to learning how to navigate and educate others on IPFS.

The technical documentation is understandable but I think I’m going to end up spinning my wheels on doing things that other people have already done.

I want to see what’s out there but I literally don’t know how. I can look at the documentation and see a ton of functionality… so much I get analysis paralysis about what is important in the context of what existing projects I can access that can help me get it.

#2

Hey, I started building a social network on IPFS, has a Discord-like messenger and a Twitter-like post functionality. https://qdesk.org It’s in Angular/NodeJS and works from the browser, you might have to replace the configured swarm peer. I have one up on our chat but not sure if that works for everyone at the moment.

Bottom line: Unfortunately people weren’t really interested enough to legitimize its existence yet. But I felt like something like this should exist, as well.

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#3

There are some difficult issues a social media platform based on IPFS has to overcome:

  • Keeping public posts around when you’re offline
  • Some sort of IPFS cluster would be a lot nicer than requiring a paid pinning service
  • Ethereum’s swarm could work- Making posting responsive (IPNS is very slow)
  • Messaging people who are offline (using some sort of inbox strategy)
  • Letting people read your posts when they don’t have the app (an IPFS gateway could work with IPNS as a fallback if IPNS weren’t so slow)
  • Allowing multiple contributors to public posts while preventing removing other people’s posts (unless maybe you’re the original poster)
  • Private groups with rotating membership
  • Authenticated friend requests that resist spamming and phishing

Some of these things would be a lot easier on Ethereum or some other smart contract blockchain but then you’d generally have to pay crypto for each operation.

I’ve looked at these problems for version 2 of Textcraft, my libp2p multiuser text adventure platform: https://github.com/zot/textcraft which should use full-on IPFS instead of just libp2p and also include a social network.

I hadn’t heard of QuestNetwork, only Gravity: https://gravitynet.io/ QuestNetwork looks ambitious, I need to look at it.

#4

Hmm, the last line of my email reply to this thread got cut off. Here it is…

From my quick look at QuestNetwork, it looks like it is trying to solve some (or maybe all) of these issues. Definitely looks worth trying out, especially since it’ll be some time before I can deliver any of this with Textcraft…

#5

Let us know what kind of service or app you’re working on. I have an open source platform that uses IPFS you can look at if you’re doing Java Language.

Speaking of all the censorship happening right now, I recently built out Fediverse (ActivityPub) into my own platform (Quanta.wiki) so that is a good step, but there needs to be a newer “Fully Decentralized” version of ActivityPub in the future I think, because now that ISPs and infrastructure companies like AWS are targeting people and companies for political reasons we need a resilient solution at least for Social Media that is uncensorable and cannot be attacked by the likes of Amazon.

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#6

Have you seen https://awesome.ipfs.io/?

#7

This was helpful and a great way to see what’s out there!