this post was submitted on 13 Mar 2024
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The idea of a federated, decentralized Wikipedia alternative is intriguing, but implementing it successfully faces major hurdles. Federating moderation policies and privileges across different instances seems incredibly complex. I believe it would also require some kind of web of trust system. Quality control is also a huge challenge without centralized oversight and clear guidelines enforced universally.

While it could potentially replace commercial wiki farms like Wikia/Fandom for niche topics, realistically replacing Wikipedia's dominance as a general reference work seems highly ambitious and unlikely, at least in the short term. But as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.

That said, ambitious goals can spur innovation. Even if Ibis falls short of usurping Wikipedia, it could blaze new trails and pioneer federated wiki concepts that feed back into Wikipedia and other platforms. The federated model allowing more perspectives and focused communities is worth exploring, despite the technical obstacles around distributed moderation and content integration. The proof-of-concept shows the core pieces are in place as a starting point.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

as they say - shoot for the stars, and you may just land on the moon.

I've only ever heard, "shoot for the moon, [and] even if you miss you'll land among the stars", which is the phrase as it was first said by Norman Vincent Peale. But maybe swapping "moon" and "stars" is a common enough variant of the phrase that I just haven't heard before.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, you are right. I've always remembered it this way because it makes more sense to me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago

I can see why. Although the stars occupy a larger portion of the sky, they are also further away than the moon. So either version of the phrase makes sense in its own way.