Lemmy Lead Developer and father of two children.

I also develop Ibis, a federated wiki.

  • 37 Posts
  • 175 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: January 17th, 2020

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  • Maintainership of a free software project can be very taxing so it’s refreshing to see attempts to address that that aren’t intrinsically at odds with the free software movement. Remember that users of free software have no entitlement to anything other than source code. There is no requirement in any free software license that a project have maintainers, take bug reports, accept pull requests, offer support, etc.

    This proposal could totally backfire though. There will be users paying 5 Euro per month and then demand on the issue tracker that major changes get implemented overnight. Or people who contribute with good bug reports that are unable to pay money, so problems remain unfixed. There might be a way to balance things so it works out, but that will take time. In any case its worth experimenting with different approaches to get open source betterfunded.




  • This is my second baby, the first one is three years old. So in my experience it’s much more fun once the child can go to the playground, starts to talk and gradually learns to do things independently. Though there are also difficulties, and of course every child is different.












  • Its not really what you are looking for, but you could my project Ibis for this. Its a wiki so instead of separate files you could use multiple markdown code blocks. Instead of a whole new project you could possibly implement gists as a custom frontend which converts to markdown for the backend. Note that the project is still in early development, so neither syntax highlighting nor federation with other platforms are available yet.


  • Mainly SEO spam with text copied from other sites and lots of ads/referral links to make the owner a profit. But after thinking about it more, those would be rather easy to filter based on ad code in the HTML.

    A much bigger challenge will be the ranking of search results. When searching for a term and there are 100 pages in the index that contain it, which of these pages should be shown first? Google developed the Pagerank when they started out, so that might be a good starting point to research further.


  • This sounds like a very interesting idea. I agree that Yacy doesnt work, when I checked it out years ago it was a completely bloated mess. Not sure how viable how your idea is, because Im not familiar with webrings, and not sure how the federation will work. Anyway the main challenge for this project will be to actually give useful search results, both early on when there are very few crawlers, and also later once spammers try to abuse it.



  • Lord of the Rings trilogy, after finishing The little Hobbit last week. Its the first time in years Im reading a book, and the last time I read those books 20 years ago. Its really so much better than the movies, knowing what the characters think or feel. And with so many small, important details which are left out of the movies.



  • Funny, Mastodon just posted a similar thing about creating a foundation. But the problem is, the existence of a foundation does nothing to prevent billionaires from controlling social media. For billionaires its very easy to donate a few hundred thousand USD to the foundation and gain influence that way. I expect that Bluesky will be fine for the first years (maybe like early Twitter), but sooner or later the foundation will take decisions that the users dont like, and there is nothing they can do about it.

    In my view, the only way to avoid influence from billionaires is to avoid any large centralized structures. In the Fediverse there are dozens of platforms and thousands of instances. Even if a billionaire were to take control over a couple of projects or large instances, people would create forks in a matter of days. Some admins would block these corrupted instances, and their users would barely notice that anything changed.

    So Bluesky is just trying to repeat something that has already failed. The Fediverse is the future, but it will take a long time for most people to understand that.


  • What you list as disadvantages are exactly the main benefits of a federated wiki. For a contentious subject which can be interpreted in multiple ways, there should be multiple different articles which present these views. It can be possible to represent other viewpoints if they share a common root, but as soon as there is a fundamentally different understanding that breaks down.

    Additionally, even a very large encyclopedia like Wikipedia cannot include all topics that users want to write about. For example when it comes to TV series, books or details about small places, it often doesnt meet the notability requirements and gets removed. So for these topics people need to use entirely separate platforms like Fandom (which are full of advertising). Ibis can allow all these topics to be present in a single network, accessible from a single user interface.