I keep feeling frustrated as valuable knowledge for my different hobbies over the last years became siloed away in corporate social media. I believe wikis could be a way out, but can we have decentralized, federated wiki software that can kind of talk among each other?

  • @breadsmasherEnglish
    4•1 year ago

    ChatGPT4 Summary

    Question

    Explain IPFS as if I was five

    Response

    Sure! You know when you want to show your friend a specific toy in your toy box, you point it out directly? That’s kind of how the Internet usually works too - it looks for the specific place (like a website’s server) where information is kept.

    But, imagine if you could find that same toy even if it was in a different box or at a friend’s house, as long as you knew what it looked like. IPFS, which stands for InterPlanetary File System, does something similar for the Internet. It doesn’t just look for where information is stored, but what the information is. This way, even if the information gets moved, it can still be found because IPFS knows what it’s looking like, not just where it used to be!

    tldr sort of like P2P content sharing. Wiki content is just files at the end of the day.

    • @crashexOPEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Sounds cool. Does that mean we need heavy disks full of data everywhere or is there a magicky way around it?

      • @breadsmasherEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        iirc You “pin” content to access, which means you’re also then hosting it. You wouldn’t need to necessarily store the entirety of wiki for example unless its held in like, data files rather than page per content.

        Im not fully up to scratch of the intricacies on IPFS, just thought it sounded like a possible solution to your use-case

        • @[email protected]English
          1•1 year ago

          As far as I know, but I might be wrong. IPFS is great for static content. But wikis are dynamic but slow.

          Every change must be stored as duplicate file. For low bandwidth text based content it could probably work.

          The 6h news cycle of web 2.0 would be incompatible with IPFS but web 3.0 and fediverse could be made more static, (more users see the same article so it could work)

          • @breadsmasherEnglish
            1•1 year ago

            Very good call! That had totally slipped my mind, thanks for pointing it out. It does look like theres a mutable file system solution that works with IPFS? Like you’ve mentioned though, this might be slow.

            Mutable File System (MFS) Because files in IPFS are content-addressed and immutable, they can be complicated to edit. Mutable File System (MFS) is a tool built into IPFS that lets you treat files like you would a regular name-based filesystem — you can add, remove, move, and edit MFS files and have all the work of updating links and hashes taken care of for you.

            https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/file-systems/

            • @crashexOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              So someone above mentioned Git, would that be comparable to how IPFS works?

              • @breadsmasherEnglish
                1•1 year ago

                Completely different solution but that would also work.

                git is a version control system (vcs), github is a git host (repository).

                It allows you to “check in” files, and if you share it / make a public repository others can check it out. You can also allow others to request changes (pull requests).

                You add files to a git vcs. Github provides public repositories. For documentation example, you could create a set of HTML changes and check them in. Whenever you then make changes to existing files, or add/delete files, the repository will track the changes (so you get a history of changes timeline).

                You can selfhost a git repository using gitlab for example. Or you could use github/gitlab as a centralised provider. Github has been around for a long time, I don’t see it going anywhere but in the worst case its trivial to push that same repository and history etc to a different provider.

                Documentation may talk about code/programming as thats its main use but its not a requirement and doesn’t require any programming knowledge.

                Github also provides a document/web page hosting thing I believe?

                https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart

                https://www.gitbook.com/

                https://docs.github.com/en/communities/documenting-your-project-with-wikis/about-wikis

                https://about.gitlab.com/install/

                https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/get-started-with-bitbucket-cloud/

                ed - git would be far simpler than IPFS but isn’t decentralised like IPFS. But like I say, migrating or self hosting is pretty trivial

                • @crashexOPEnglish
                  1•1 year ago

                  Thanks for your detailed explanation. The IPFS seems to be run by one guy also involved in something cryptocurrency, that looks a bit fishy to me. (Just a personal first impression by me, who has no clue and might be all wrong). From quickly looking into both I would probably prefer sth like git, as it has been around for longer. How is git not decentralized - as I understand, with git the files are stored on several machines and everyone can make and commit changes? I might still be struggling to understand the whole concept of decentralized here. Github is owned by Microsoft apparently and I won’t touch their stuff unless I really have to.