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

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

I recently came across three separate platforms:

Qortal: https://qortal.org/

ZeroNet: https://zeronet.io/

and

Plebbit: https://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.

https://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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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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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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Can I ask what you're planning to use block chain for? To verify each account? Or to federate instances?

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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 + DHT, torrent style, should be enough.

Blockchain is the wrong solution for that problem.

Check out Nostr, its's pretty much what we need.

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The blockchain is always a scam.

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