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?
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
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)
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.
https://docs.ipfs.tech/concepts/file-systems/
So someone above mentioned Git, would that be comparable to how IPFS works?
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
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.