The distributed web

Tech
#1

I’m tip-toeing into the world of the distributed web.

I set up a mastodon instance to play around with it, and have started meeting nice people.

I am seeding my personal homepage (dat://hecanjog.com) with the dat protocol, and have had some fun trying out the beaker browser.

The beaker browser and dat especially are inspiring, and feel like possible future paths for real self-hosting beyond the current centralized platform world that’s normal now.

Reminds me of the playground-like situation of the early web.

Hosting a static HTML site with audio files on dat really feels exciting. I hope to at least mirror my netlabel on dat soon.

Go go distributed web! What else is there?

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Blogging platforms
#2

This is very interesting to me. Gonna come back and check it out later when I have more time.

#3

For what it’s worth there is some related discussion around distributed web-esque technologies in an older thread: Building the world you want to live in.

I continue to see investment in things like Secure Scuttlebutt and ipfs. I ran a publicly accessible scuttlebutt node for a few months while I was exploring the system but in the end I found navigating the “gossip” content too confusing for my wee brain.

I’ve long wondered about the possibilities for decentralized collaboration platforms focused on creative endeavors and how flexible devices like norns could participate in that space.

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#4

IndieWeb is also a very interesting concept. One of the main idea is to own your content. For example, I have set a POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) publishing model.
I post my content on my website and then it’s automatically published on other platforms (Mastodon, Twitter, etc.). It means that if in the future, Twitter shut down for X reason, I do not lose all my contents/tweets.

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#5

I’ve just signed in under aleatoric forest. Interested to explore decentralised communities.
EDIT: Hope is ok!

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#6

I didn’t know about all of this, being a web developer myself I’m VERY EXCITED about this stuff! I’m checking it all out now, new worlds opening, thanks! Any links to interesting music projects on there that are up and running already?

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#7

Absolutely!

Nice, thanks! IPFS felt really promising too but it felt like it could have really benefited from a beaker browser type project. (I guess beaker did support IPFS at first but they have since removed it for some reason.) The combination of beaker being an editor & host platform so you can make a new dat site right from the browser, and dat supporting stable URLs that can be mapped to normal DNS TXT records for human-readable URLs is pretty great too.

Scuttlebutt sounds interesting!

I haven’t come across a lot but p2p distribution seems like a great platform for netlabels.

I’m really curious about funkwhale which seems like a self-hosted spotify-type platform?

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#8

Very interesting. I’m trying to set one up as we speak :smiling_imp:

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#9

On a more lower level, cjdns and Tahoe-LAFS might be worth a look.

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#10

I’ve been following and using Ethereum and IPFS for a good while, now. The most interesting project I’ve come across using both is a social blogging platform called Akasha, and I was pretty active on there for a time. I’ve also put some music up on Ujo and messed around a bit with ENS as well as resolving DNS to IPFS-hosted content.

This stuff is incredibly exciting, but it seems I’m forever waiting for the ecosystems to mature.

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#11

Yeah, being a pioneer can be a very lonely experience. I’m always keen but often distracted by boredom :smile:

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#12

Did funkwhale seem interesting / useful? I still haven’t gotten around to playing with it!

#13

It certainly looks great, but I have quickly been pulled in a maelstrom of technical difficulties and my funkwhale server hasn’t been set up yet. It’s a bit different development environment I’m used to so I haven’t even been able to test it locally, but I’m still on it! I need to set up my router to accept outside connections and so forth. Really looking forward to it, especially because I think many of us here would probably been keen to populate a platform like this.

#14

I’ve found a couple nice sound art / music oriented mastodon instances since getting back into it.

  • post.lurk.org is one of the projects of the venerated LURK community
  • I don’t know much about SoNoMu but it’s great and I follow several folks there

I love the neighborhood / island nature of mastodon’s distributed instances but it also makes it a bit of a challenge to explore the space.

Can anyone point to more sound art / computer music / etc etc oriented instances?

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#15

So I don’t fully know what to make of it, yet, but this is fairly new:

I imagine it will make more sense with the next version of Akasha, which I eagerly await. In any case, I for one have long considered Ethereum and IPFS’s most promising use-cases to be as better means of publishing in any context, along with more meaningful interaction around published content (to include better and more transparent aggregation on all levels).

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#16

This just popped up in the IPFS newsletter:

I figured the admins here might be interested.

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