this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I gotta admit though, this has to be one of the first reasonable use cases for blockchain technology that I can think of - a P2P database for social forums... decentralised, but a single "instance" no matter how you access it. I imagine the blockchain sizes would get ridiculously large though, and all sorts of moderation issues. Probably not feasible, though I'm sure there's a project on GitHub I'm not aware of...
If you were to host the entire forum on a blockchain, every node would have to hold the blockchain. So not scaling horizontally, but instead copying the "database" a bunch of times. Think of hosting all of the data in reddit on a thousand nodes. Sure you could access it from any node, but the database would be just as big as before, just copied around a bunch of times.
In a way this thing is already much more decentralized than a blockchain could ever be, in that every server doesn't hold all of the data at once. Much better use of resources IMO.
Yeah that's a good point. But this way we can't mine LemmyCoin. Won't someone think of the shitcoins!?
For sure if reddit can have moons, then a blockchain forum should have their own shitcoin. How else would the founder of the decentralized platform make some bank? Get donations from from the general public for the volunteer work they do on the project? No way :)
A much better use of resources, but you shard the data amongst potentially untrusted hosts (ie, anybody can stand up a lemmy instance and start hosting posts/comments, and then get sick of hosting it and delete their instance and all the uploaded data).
Federation only allows access to the network of servers, it doesn't protect the data at all, which means at any moment an entire community of useful historical information could just be wiped away (especially since there's currently no monetary incentive to continue hosting, its only being done out of desire to be part of the network).
I guess I'd rather see the blockchain (or simpler caching/mirroring) approach, something like the torrent network, so that no single person has access to delete content. We can all choose to not view or not mirror content we don't agree with, but nobody can single-handedly own or modify the data
Unless each node holds all the data, it is not guaranteed to stay available. Mirroring content across 2, 3, or even 10 servers wouldn't guarantee that it will remain eg. after 10 years. Even torrents die after they are no longer popular and people stop seeding them.
I still hold my opinion that using an actual blockchain to hold the conversations is not scalable solution at all. Only unique thing it would enable is for unwanted content to remain permanently in the system.