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 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.
Web Browsers are all federated because they communicate with each other over a common standard.
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.
There’s also https://forgefed.org/
Forgejo is implementing federation
Interesting!
What are some cool projects I need to know about?
Email, usenet
IRC
Internet is already federated, its just called peering instead?
Federated wikipedia : Ibis.
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.
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Maybe search engines idk, something like Yucy?
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.
github is not just about git though.
Yep, but the rest can mostly be replaced with a mailing list. Or, if you’re allergic to email, there’s also https://forgejo.org/.
I’m not allergic to emails, I use them a lot, but I think a mailing list is not a federated github, but a mess.
Forgejo is a much better choice in my opinion.
Peertube (Youtube-like) and Loops (Tiktok-like) and Pixelfed (Instagram-like Photosharing service) are growing.
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
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
This is a fun thing I found, wish they had an android app or something.
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
Not federated, but distrubuted github https://radicle.xyz/
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.
