So now that decentralized forums are more than an intellectual exercise..

mindlessobserver said:
Genuinely curious. Now that we have such high levels of bandwidth available world wide, isn't it theoretically possible for a discussion forum to exist via torrenting? Every users harddrive being "the host". Its probably a security nightmare, but in my head it should be technically feasible depending on how large the individual packets are and how reliant the forum would be on how many people are "hosting" it.
Click to expand...
Sure, and this wouldn't be hard. The easy part is moving all the data around, the hard part is the details - user management, moderation, spam filtering, etc.

Rough estimate here:
There's 13,000,000 posts on KF
Each post is about 1000 characters
So if you skip the images, that's only about 13 gigabytes - maybe 2GB with compression. That's what, one movie? Anyone can download a movie onto their phone, you could comfortably keep a local (text-only) archive on a laptop from 2006 without running into any major issues.

Here comes the fun part: who gets to add posts to that pile? Who gets to remove them? Who gets to decide who gets to decide who gets to add posts?
 
People expect rich multimedia. High res images and video. Most of the old tech solutions in this thread can't do that. Packet radio with just 2 or 3 digipeater hops could take 60 seconds or more to hammer the text of this post through. And NNTP, Fidonet is store and forward. People wont want to wait 24 hours like we used to for replies to come back to their posts. And once its forwarded you lose any moderation control.

The future is NOW and it is TOR. You could set up a TOR only forum and as long as you didn't fuck up it would be basically impossible to locate. You could also have the forum's main database on a hidden TOR only server. Then have multi-homed normienet nodes sync to that hidden server. So if the normienet datacenters are found and pressured to boot you out you could just spin up another instance someplace else and have it sync up to the hidden TOR central database.

Null has said the KF database is 7TB.
 
  • Like
Reactions: quaawaa
Jump said:
People expect rich multimedia. High res images and video. Most of the old tech solutions in this thread can't do that.
Click to expand...
I don't know mang, Reddit doesn't support either and it's pretty big. I'd be pretty happy if I had a really solid place that would under no circumstances ban me or go down, that wasn't spam-infested.
Jump said:
The future is NOW and it is TOR. You could set up a TOR only forum and as long as you didn't fuck up it would be basically impossible to locate. You could also have the forum's main database on a hidden TOR only server. Then have multi-homed normienet nodes sync to that hidden server. So if the normienet datacenters are found and pressured to boot you out you could just spin up another instance someplace else and have it sync up to the hidden TOR central database.
Click to expand...
This is true, but it requires an admin.
Jump said:
Null has said the KF database is 7TB.
Click to expand...
That 7TB includes images and, more to the point, gigabytes of archived shit that nobody in their right mind is ever going to watch.
 
Jump said:
People expect rich multimedia. High res images and video.
Click to expand...
That's what ruined the internet. Normies expecting high res images and video to be served to them in seconds, just before their attention span runs out.

Be that as it may, any sort of decentralized store-and-forward network in the style of FidoNet would need to support image attachments, as well as .torrent files and/or magnet links to facilitate the transfer of video and audio.

It'd be slow, but it'd also be robust as long as there are plenty of peers. It also wouldn't hurt if users were forced to slow down wrt absorbing and distributing information of this nature. Real time news feed style social media rots people's brains, and time isn't necessarily of the essence when it comes to documenting lolcows.
 
Last edited:
  • Agree
Reactions: TheSkoomer
Slime Tube said:
Something similar to nntpchan?
Click to expand...
[old but this was written while the forum was up last time and it's still here so I'll press post]

I don't know shit about webstuff, but no. That's NNTP, but maybe? I don't know. My idea wouldn't be to have multiple instances of the forum that mirror or sync against each other, it would be to smash the forum into pieces and each piece is independent but collaborating with the others. It would require a lot of cooperation though. The food forum is not very controversial, if that was its own unique little forum and and a user thought "imma start a thread to talk shit about this tranny" then that isn't the right shard for it, even if the right place for it is down at that moment. So it gets deleted and the user is asked to take it over to rat king or preferably the prospering grounds forum, just like now, except those are different places entirely.

These would all be different forums and it would require A LOT of cooperation and good will among mods and admins to keep things running in the way it works now. If a mod/admin in "prospering grounds" sees that a thread has legs and it's obviously destined for "Internet Famous" but can't just move it there then... I don't know.

All tied together by a frontpage/index/frontend that is that just links to different servers for different subforums that might link to more... This is why managing logins would be a fucking nightmare.

It's not possible to do and 95% of the current problems would still be around while adding 40% new problems, but if the trannies are upset because someone called waffles fat and try to dox and ddos everything including the independent cat-lady knitting & animal husbandry forum, because the lineage could be traced back to the current farms, then that might look bad and they might spend their powder on other independent forums or independent threads.


The idea is to break the forum into pieces and very loosely thread it back together. Mods and admins would have to have power over several shards at once to keep it together, some more than others, to create the web holding it all together. Why? idk, just to spread it out.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back