New Flair Suggestion
Posted by AnonomousWolf@reddit | RedditAlternatives | View on Reddit | 12 comments
I see we have Centralized as a post flair in this community.
Can we expand on that? And have
Centralized & Open-Source
Decentralized & Open-Source
Centralized & Propitiatory
Decentralized & Propitiatory
And make it mandatory to select one of these when advertising an alternative?
This is really important and something we should care about, because if a app isn't Decentralized then once they gain enough users they could start enshitifying, and if a app isn't Open-Source they can start locking features behind a pay wall etc.
deleted_by_reddit@reddit
[removed]
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Born_Unit_7204@reddit
I think this would be a good change, my project falls under open source and decentralized I think?
It's on a public repo with AGPLv3 licensing, and its intended for people who want to run the project to be able to install it how they see fit and utilize it. That might not scream decentralized right now but eventually I plan on making instances federate with each other (not activity pub, not crypto, just REST based federation)
AnonomousWolf@reddit (OP)
Nice yes that's the only way I see to keep platforms free of Enshitification
Born_Unit_7204@reddit
Yep that is sort of the plan, a decentralized network of nodes that is ad free by design and FOSS
AnonomousWolf@reddit (OP)
Perhaps with "Centralised & Proprietary" being red (bad)
"Decentralised & Open-Source" being green (good)
And the mix's being orange
habarnam@reddit
Might want to edit the post, you have "propitiatory" instead of "proprietary" and I was struggling to understand how open-source was antonymous with it...
AnonomousWolf@reddit (OP)
Lol thanks, I think I'm a bit lysdecsic
Toothless_NEO@reddit
I would opt to call Open source ones that are not federated or distributed in any way Siloed as opposed to centralized. Since they aren't really centralized. You can host more of them, they just can't communicate with each other. Centralized by default means that the service and community is locked in there. With a siloed but open source alternative you could re-host it the only downside is that it can be hard to get the community to follow you.
I don't think that there are any closed source Fediverse alternatives out there. Maybe threads could be considered one but I don't even think their federation still works, plus it was very widely blocked. I don't think there are very many people out there seeking to make closed-source fediverse platforms and if there are I don't expect them to gain very much trust from the community. And I do expect for there to be a lot of pushback from instances and communities within the fediverse.
I didn't really see the point in having another decentralized tag because the only other type of decentralized platform out there is something like web3 or blockchain. I could add two separate tags for these differentiating between closed source, and open source. I don't really see anything wrong with that. Although when it comes to the blockchain and web3 stuff the platforms They are promoting, compared to the software used to make them work are usually pretty divorced from each other. Like for example there are different software that can act as Nostr relays. Some of it open source, some of it not. But if someone is promoting Nostr as a service or platform, they're probably not promoting a specific software. So I thought it was best to just not differentiate which might cause confusion.
I know about peer-to-peer (P2P) based alternatives although I don't really think that any of them really took off. And most of them are horrendously insecure and not something that people should be joining. One of the more popular ones would almost always leak your IP to the other participants, like by design because it worked very similar to BitTorrent. You could use a VPN or build Tor into the client but it introduces a level of risk that you might as well not introduce. Also because they rely on peer-to-peer infrastructure you can lose messages if you're not online to receive them. It's a cool idea, I don't deny that but in practice it just doesn't work and a lot of people just don't like it.
AnonomousWolf@reddit (OP)
BlueSky is decentralised, but the vast majority of their code-base is proprietary as far as I know.
What flairs do you suggest?
Toothless_NEO@reddit
Since Bluesky requires their centralized server infrastructure, at least at the moment. I think the best way to flare it would be as centralized.
Since at the current time it does function in a very centralized way, you can only make an account and post to the Bluesky instance. And you can't really create your own separate instances. If we ever get to the point where people can run their own instances with logins and authentication independent of the Bluesky servers I might add its own flair for ATproto. As it stands though it's a decentralized service, which functions almost exactly like a centralized one.
AnonomousWolf@reddit (OP)
you can technically migrate your accout to eg. https://www.eurosky.tech/
and login to that server and post, and anyone can see it.
so it's technically decentralized, but in practice it's still centralized