I find it bizarre that we’re a community that should be laser-focused on decentralization…yet we still use corporate-owned websites for our discussions like Twitter, Discord, Reddit, etc. I’m not attacking this discourse because it’s at least run by the foundation.
Anyway, why are we so incapable of being the change we want to see in the world?
I just wanted to stop by and invite all of you to the Cardano communities on Lemmy and kbin that I created. I moderate most of them.
Here’s a list of the three that I created (created 3 just in case one instance gets shut down).
Just trying to understand how this is all intended to fit together. All are Reddit knock-offs (Lemmy and Kbin: The Best Reddit Alternatives?) but infosec.pub itself is apparently using Lemmy software… with logins and the Cardano postings both completely distinct between sites?
That would mean the 2 Cardano communities above using Lemmy have independent & therefore fragmented audiences. Technically the set of all 3 is fragmented but I would guess the survival of any Reddit competitor is not guaranteed & therefore channels should be diversified between platforms.
It also appears an account created on Lemmy doesn’t create a single sign-on for sites like infosec.pub that are using the same software. If I’ve gotten that wrong then please let me know since it would probably be a deterrent to general use if so (though not without precedent, e.g. FreeTube)
I guess the fediverse is confusing to people at first. Lemmy is a fediverse version of reddit. Kbin also exists but has far less dev momentum. I created not one but three communities because of the nature of the fediverse. I created the Lemmy.world one for the ubiquity (Lemmy.world is the largest Lemmy instance by far…but also not very good)
I then created the Cardano community on infosec.pub (intended to be the main one) because that’s where the official bitcoin community was AND infosec.pub is a stellar instance.
Then, I created the kbin one because kbin is a totally separate app that barely talks properly to Lemmy.
So, yes there is a small amount of fragmentation…but that’s the point. We don’t run Cardano on one machine. We run it on thousands of machines that are connected together. I wanted to make sure that Cardano cannot be removed from the fediverse.
For governance, the Cardano community will need a central forum for governance proposals and debate which is maintained in a decentralized manner. The attempt is to reduce discussion fragmentation while increasing document decentralization at the same time.
The following idea for this (repeated below) is found in Beemocracy under the following link.
Perhaps the idea could work for general Cardano discussions as well.
We will need an immutable website using the decentralized IPFS protocol which presents a forum to contain the text and the hash for all governance proposals and all BRep solicitations for delegation, for or against the proposal.
Everything on the governance website must persist for all eternity so future generations will know why we made the decisions we made.
With every governance proposal and solicitation, there must be a payment in ADA to cover the cost of hosting the proposal and to prevent spamming the system.
This ADA will be staked in a random stake pool, and automatically, the staking rewards will be distributed to the owners of the computers which host the proposal webpages by lottery as follows.
Distributing the staking rewards by lottery allows market forces to promote redundant copies of all proposal webpages.
At random intervals, one of the hosted webpages (selected by lottery) for a given proposal will be requested and hashed to ensure the data is accessible and that the contents has not been altered.
The IPFS address and the document hash should be the same if the document has not been changed.
If the proposal webpage is returned then the host is paid the staking rewards associated with that lottery slot
If the proposal webpage is not returned by the host computer then the host does not get paid the lottery reward and the lottery is repeated with another host for that proposal webpage selected at random.
If a host fails again to return the data the next time it wins the lottery then it is removed from the index of hosts for that governance proposal
So document hosts get paid by lottery in much the same way as Cardano stake pool operators get paid
In this way the proposal webpage and all associated solicitations will persist for all eternity in a decentralized manner.
CC, BRep, and SPO votes to remain transparent by virtue of the solicitation process which forces all to explain their votes and leave a body of information so that future generations will understand why those decisions were made
This is a pretty cool idea. I wonder how difficult it would be to plug that into a Lemmy instance.
As you mentioned, we could even work in all kinds of interesting stuff that crypto could offer to a community. Lemmy is written in Rust, so we could actually do some pretty interesting stuff with the codebase (compared to the ancient php stack that kbin is based on).
Ps. kbin has some mention of Cardano wallets in their codebase so we might want to help out on the fork of kbin called Mbin that has been picking up steam lately (kbin is developed by one person, is written in PHP () and is in serious technical debt).
Edit: kbin still includes some mention of Cardano in their fork…but again…php
managed to recruit a moderator from the Cardano subreddit to co-moderate the Lemmy community I created on world. Reddit blocks me from messaging him again, though, so I can’t even ask him to join as mod on the other communities.
Not sure if I’ve been clear but I’d be more than happy to take down the Cardano communities I created if we created our own instance. IMO, if we ran our own instance, it would be BIG news in the fediverse and we’d see a ton of reactions (both positive and negative…maybe mostly negative honestly but as they say, no news is bad news).
If we could put our dev weight behind TRULY DECENTRALIZED, FAIR governance in the context of a Lemmy/pub-sub community, it would have MASSIVE positive effects on our reputation in the fediverse (which is currently 99% negative, in my experience). The way that the Haskell community started to come around on Cardano’s side could be mirrored in the fediverse.
I’m honestly flabbergasted that Charles hasn’t recommended this in the context of governance, though maybe he has (since I can’t possibly keep up with all of his hours of AMA’s).
Lemmy is certainly worth a look and might fit well into the tool stack.
My focus is always to increase the use and utility of the Cardano tool stack because this makes our coin more valuable. So I will always look at tools from our community first because I want our community to be the first to solve new problems.
Currently, for instance, I believe it is expensive to verify that the host has the document and that the bandwidth has been made available for users to download it. To test this, it is my understanding that the consumer/tester must request the entire document and the host must provide it in a timely manner. Then the consumer/tester must hash the document to ensure that it matches the IPFS address of the document. I think this is one reason that decentralized document storage has not caught on despite all the money which has been spent developing the idea.
One compromise which proves the host at least has the document is to send the host a random number that is to be appended to the document. The host then hashes the document and sends back the hash to the consumer/tester. Then the consumer/tester hashes the document along with the same appended random number. If the hash is the same then the consumer/tester knows that the host at least is in possession of the document. The problem with this approach is that the consumer/tester must also have the document in order to hash it and the hashing computation is expensive. So what’s the point of even having the host except for redundancy?
I am no expert, in fact I am not even a novice, but it seems to me that recursive zero knowledge proofs, which will likely be available with the Midnight sidechain, solve this problem and so Cardano could be the first to market with an inexpensive way to prove a host at least is in possession of a document.
Then reports from general consumers could be used to verify bandwidth and document availability.
I don’t want to pretend that I have the skills to do any of this, I am just saying it would be fun if our community were the first to have a single place to go for decentralized storage and a decentralized forum.
Impressive! Thanks for your input! I’m also in the camp of having a ton of ideas but not nearly the technical chops to accomplish them. I hope more people chime in on this.
I’d love to see what Charles thinks of this since, IMO, we are still fairly centralized and siloed when it comes to governance forums (which I’ve been outspoken about the inherent hypocrisy of for a LONG time).
I found out about Mobilizon today. It seems like the perfect place for federated events, group charters, and shared resources.
For those unaware, Mobilizon looks to fill the role of something like Facebook groups for the fediverse. I believe it is compatible with both Mastodon and Lemmy through the groups actor in the ActivityPub spec but provides additional functionality dealing with scheduled events and shared resources.
I must confess that I feel completely overwhelmed by the bewildering array of chat alternatives. However, I have effectively ruled myself out of most of them because they are not open source and freedom preserving. For example, I can’t use Twitter, Telegram, Signal etc. because they require a mobile phone number registration which will effectively give BigTech easy ability to track everything I do. They also enforce the use of centrally controlled servers.
Having a free, open source and secure way to manage our own data and ideas that we can share with others is a massive gaping hole. I too don’t understand why people are prepared to build up so much of their on-line identity based upon a proprietary platform like Twitter - X. It is a rug pull waiting to happen, and they are giving all their thoughts and data to Elon Musk’s private AI machines.
I have been using the Matrix Cardano Professional Society rooms that @Michael.Liesenfelt set up. These seem great but not many people use them. I can’t see why Matrix is significantly inferior to Twitter for general chat aside from less people using it. However, obviously Matrix is not the solution for permanent document storage.
I agree: We need a decentralised, free, open source, permissionless, social media sharing platform.
) and is in serious technical debt).