NutomicAnnouncing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative
vikingVery interesting concept. Since the original wikipedia is in most parts published under licenses that permit copying & adaptations, are you planning to integrate their articles as a snapshot for the sake of having a solid foundation?
I dont have time for that, but other people could setup instances which mirror parts of Wikipedia.
GregorGizehThe link is virtually unreadable, it formats really strangely on mobile. The text is in a 1cm wide column on the right side, allowing only ~3 letters per row.
Im bad at CSS, contributions welcome: github.com/Nutomic/ibis/blob/master/…/ibis.css
For those on desktop, this is what mobile users see:
the entire internet may as well look like this for me i hate knowledge
Rather than starting from scratch, would it make more sense to make an ActivityPub plugin for the open-source MediaWiki software Wikipedia runs on? MediaWiki already has some “interwiki” functionality that such a plugin could expand on, and you’d have the advantage of being able to fork content from WP and other MW projects without having to re-format it. Plus you’d be able to leverage other MW plugins—Semantic MediaWiki in particular could add a lot of useful functionality to federated wikis, like articles that could query and aggregate information from other federated articles rather than just linking to the text.
Both projects could run and integrate with each other. I like it.
Mediawiki is an extremely complicated project with 1.2 million lines of PHP. For me it was much easier to implement this project with technology Im already familiar with. But of someone wants to create a Mediawiki plugin I would be happy to see that.
muntedcrocodileFor the love of god fix ur mobile css
You can make a pull request here: github.com/Nutomic/ibis/blob/master/…/ibis.css
GhostalmediaNot everyone here is a developer.
And some developers are bad at design/css (like me).
Fair, but I would argue that the basics of CSS positioning aren’t too complex.
And at this point we’re just talking about moving that NAV element to the top of the page, not the left side.
I believe this addresses your concern:
Oliver LoweDev publishes unreadable website:
"Some developers are bad at CSS and design/CSS (like me)"
Implying some innate incapacity.
Same dev:
"Or these people could learn Rust and contribute to the existing project."
https://lemmy.ml/comment/8855579
Man I just don't get it. There's a kind of wilful ignorance here or something? It's jarring. All due respect for what's been made but this attitude... I'm not offended or have disdain, just dumbfounded at the messaging.
TIL about Sublinks, a Java-based alternative to Lemmy's backend - Lemmy
Today I learned about Sublinks (here [https://lemmy.world/comment/8015709]), an open-source project that aims to be a drop-in replacement for the backend of Lemmy, a federated link aggregator and microblogging platform. Sublinks is designed to be initially API-compatible with Lemmy, allowing existing Lemmy clients, such as Lemmy-UI, to integrate seamlessly. The project is written in Java, which may introduce some overhead but is chosen for its maintainability and familiarity among a wider pool of developers. The Sublinks team prioritizes a more inclusive and less toxic development environment, and the project has already attracted more developers than Lemmy. While Sublinks is starting with 1:1 compatibility, future plans include implementing additional features that the Lemmy developers have not pursued. This could lead to a divergence in functionality between the two platforms as Sublinks evolves beyond its initial compatibility phase. — #### README GitHub stars [https://img.shields.io/github/stars/sublinks/sublinks?style=social] GitHub tag (latest SemVer) [https://img.shields.io/github/tag/sublinks/sublinks.svg] gradle workflow [https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks/actions/workflows/gradle.yml/badge.svg] GitHub issues [https://img.shields.io/github/issues-raw/sublinks/sublinks.svg]https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks/issues License [https://img.shields.io/github/license/sublinks/sublinks.svg]LICENSE # Sublinks [https://sublinks.org] ### A decentralized, censorship-resistant, and privacy-preserving social network. - Join Sublinks [https://sublinks.org] - Demo Sublinks [https://demo.sublinks.org] - Documentation [https://sublinks.org/docs] - Matrix Chat [https://matrix.to/#/#sublinks:discuss.online] - Report Bug [https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks/issues] - Request Feature [https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks/issues] - Releases [https://github.com/sublinks/sublinks/blob/main/RELEASES.md] - Code of Conduct [https://sublinks.org/docs/code_of_conduct.html] - Contributing [https://sublinks.org/docs/contributing.html] - Style Guide [https://sublinks.org/docs/style_guide.html] ## About Sublinks, crafted using Java Spring Boot, stands as a state-of-the-art link aggregation and microblogging platform, reminiscent yet advanced compared to Lemmy & Kbin. It features a Lemmy compatible API, allowing for seamless integration and migration for existing Lemmy users. Unique to Sublinks are its enhanced moderation tools, tailored to provide a safe and manageable online community space. Embracing the fediverse, it supports the ActivityPub protocol, enabling interoperability with a wide range of social platforms. Sublinks is not just a platform; it’s a community-centric ecosystem, prioritizing user experience, content authenticity, and networked social interaction. ## Features - Open source, MIT License [/LICENSE]. - Self hostable, easy to deploy. - Clean, mobile-friendly interface. - Only a minimum of a username and password is required to sign up! - User avatar support. - Live-updating Comment threads. - Full vote scores (+/-) like old Reddit. - Themes, including light, dark, and solarized. - Emojis with autocomplete support. Start typing : - User tagging using @, Community tagging using !. - Integrated image uploading in both posts and comments. - A post can consist of a title and any combination of self text, a URL, or nothing else. - Notifications, on comment replies and when you’re tagged. - Notifications can be sent via email. - Private messaging support. - i18n / internationalization support. - RSS / Atom feeds for All, Subscribed, Inbox, User, and Community. - Cross-posting support. - A similar post search when creating new posts. Great for question / answer communities. - Moderation abilities. - Public Moderation Logs. - Can sticky posts to the top of communities. - Both site admins, and community moderators, who can appoint other moderators. - Can lock, remove, and restore posts and comments. - Can ban and unban users from communities and the site. - Can transfer site and communities to others. - Can fully erase your data, replacing all posts and comments. - NSFW post / community support. - High performance. ## Contact - Mastodon [https://utter.online/@sublinks] - Support Forum [https://discuss.online/c/sublinks_support] ## Contributing - Contributing instructions [https://sublinks.org/docs/contributors/01-overview] - Local Development [https://sublinks.org/docs/contributors/local-development] ## Support / Donate Sublinks is free, open-source software, meaning no advertising, monetizing, or venture capital, ever. Your donations directly support full-time development of the project.
If you want to people to contribute, it’s best to make an effort to try to clean up after yourself when you work.
This kind of feels like entering a building site covered in debris and being told I’d be more qualified than the mess maker to use the broom and dust pan.
Positioning two rectangles is not hard. Put them on top of each other, not side by side. You actually need to do more work to make a page like this have a left nav.
I kind of feel like I’m walking into a construction site where someone didn’t some amazingly complex joinery, and I trip over the cuttings on the shop floor.
Then I say “you might want to clear a path here,” and I’m told by the woodworker that they never learned to use a dustpan, but it’s over there. “Go sweep for me.”
Ha nice analogy. Might steal it if that's ok! :)
Reminds me of a place I used to work at. Small place; 10 people. I started as a sysadmin but later started programming. They encouraged me; "yes we suck at this we need help!" so I kept going. But as the work became more involved and I needed a bit of co-operation from their side, it was torture. They didn't "suck" at it, they just didn't respect or bother themselves with that kind of work.
but this attitude
Opensource is not some public service you just request something and the developers create it for you. If anything attitude like yours are what’s burning out opensource developers.
It’s their time, work and effort and I am glad they’re upfront about it rather than pacify everyone’s request beyond what they already do.
This is not about software licensing nor the spirit of FOSS.
There's some inconsistent messaging that's genuinely confusing me. I've shared an anecdote below (from a time when I was developing open source software) in the interest of generating discussion to clear it up for me and perhaps others, too. I don't mean to imply I know what is happening right here.
JackGreenEarthI know CSS, but not git. How can I test the webpage css and upload it to your project?
If you just paste your suggested CSS improvements with example code into a new GitHub issue, that may lead to another git-savy contributor creating a pull request.
I need the js and html as well as the css for the frontend, but I can’t easily see where that’s located
HM King Charles III DG FDAverage nutomic response 🗿
based
For the love of god, be more polite
This is a cool idea, but I highly encourage you to target mobile first. Reference works will get a LOT of mobile traffic. More than 80% of Wikipedia’s traffic is mobile.
I’m not good at frontend development or webdesign so I definitely need help in those areas.
sabI'm not sure I see the benefit of this. The point that Wikipedia might eventually become corrupted is made moot by the permissive licensing of the information there. The main challenge of the Wiki format is with fact checking and ensuring quality, which is only made more complicated by having a federated platform.
ActivityPub is great for creating the social web. The added benefit of ActivityPub for non-social services is not obvious to me at all.
That said, it's a cool proof of concept, and I'm sure it can be useful for certain types of federated content management - I just don't see how it could ever make sense as a Wikipedia alternative.
fᵣₑfᵢI can definitely see it being a better alternative to that Fandom wiki site
Then again, why would a fan page want to open for contributions from outside of that fan page? Why would the Star Wars wiki federate edits with the Startrek wiki? On which page of the wiki would this make sense?
I just don't get it.
I guess you don’t have to get it. I just mentioned that site as an example because it is kind of garbage, but it’s useful for fans.
And the federation between fandoms would be like how different articles are connected on Wikipedia. For example, there are actors that had roles both in the Star Trek universe and the Star Wars universe.
Lots of those fan wikis just link to other websites. It's entirely possible to do that.
If you're on a Star Trek wiki, why would you want to go to a page that's almost exclusively talking about Star Wars information in relation to some actor other?
I was pointing out that the two fandoms are actually connected by some actors because the person I was responding to seemed to be unaware.
Maybe no one does this, but I’ve looked at character pages and clicked on actors’ pages if I liked them and wanted to see what other work they’ve done.
At minimum it means you don’t have to create two separate accounts to make edits on both instances.
This sounds like you want federation to replace openID.
Throwing shit at a wall would be a better alternative to the Fandom wiki site.
The main reason people use Fandom in the first place is the free hosting. Whether you use MediaWiki or any other wiki software, paying for the server resources to host your own instance and taking the time to manage it is still a tall hurdle for many communities. There already are plenty of MediaWiki instances for specific interests that aren’t affected by Fandom’s problems.
Even so, federation tends to foster a culture of more self-hosting and less centralization, encouraging more people who have the means to host to do so, though I’m not sure how applicable that effect would be to wikis.
yessikgFanlore already exists as an alternative
What are the articles written in? Wiki lang (or whatever it’s called) is horrendous, IMO. Hopefully this is markdown? I couldn’t find after a quick browse through codebase and I don’t think it’s mentioned in the blog post.
Yes it uses markdown.
Interesting idea,
But search sites currently can't find anything in lemmy.
So how will they link to this?
spadufThis is super exciting. I think one of the things a lot of people are missing here is the potential for wikis to augment existing fediverse communities. Reddit’s killer feature has always been the massive treasure trove of information for hobbyists and niche interests. There is huge potential in the fediverse to take advantage of that sort of natural collaborative knowledge building process.
Looks like a federated wiki, which is great. And not a Wikipedia alternative. What makes wikipedia wikipedia is not the tech. Social and knowledge problems can’t be solved with tech ;)
As much as Wikipedia has issues, as the ibis announcement states, it also works in many places. And federating it won’t help with the issues of bad moderation, quite the contrary. And as much as I like nutomic (thanks for syncthing-android ;) ), I don’t hear many good things about the lemmy moderation story. So I have my doubts. Lets hope I am wrong. Plus anyway, federated wikis is a great thing to have, ignoring the whole Wikipedia aspect.
I would be willing to change the title, maybe “Announcing Ibis, the federated Wiki” ?
ripcordThat would work much, much better I think.
Actually its too complicated to change the title in Ibis due to federation. Plus I would have to rewrite the whole intro. But I will keep it in mind for the future.
What’s wrong with lemmy moderation? I haven’t had issues.
Honest question out of interest: Are you doing moderation on lemmy?
I just remember reading about admins/mods complaining about the lack of tooling, sometimes plain functionality (removal of certain things) for effective moderation. I am not doing any myself so that’s very 3rd-party-ish knowledge (if you even want to call it that).
Ahh sorry I misunderstood. I thought you meant moderation is bad from the user’s perspective, not from the mod’s perspective.
looks good so far
Eugene Alvin Villar 🇵🇭@nutomic aside from leveraging ActivityPub, I'm not sure what Ibis is bringing to the table that numerous failed distributed wiki alternatives haven't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HaeB/Timeline_of_distributed_Wikipedia_proposals
katy ✨wikipedia is already a great non profit source of public knowledge though i don’t see the benefit of fracturing it
i can see a benefit to using this to replace things like fandom wikia though
The moderators of Wikipedia are largely a small, insular community that don’t always care about accuracy when it comes from anyone outside their clique.
Look I really hate to shatter your perception of Wikipedia and no doubt Wikipedia is a beautiful idea with many beautiful who have contributed to it…
… but at this point Wikipedia could use a nice fracturing, like “piggy bank thrown against the wall” style fracturing.
The organization is standing in the way of the idea at this point and it is largely not a healthy organization for the people participating in it.
This makes me wonder if you could make a super frictionless path from a thread on lemmy or another federated reddit-like to some form of a wiki page that presented the same information but in a more natural form for a longer term repository of knowledge instead of a conversation. About sidebars and pinned threads for subreddits/lemmy communities are an extremely important part of the structure of a reddit-like, but why limit our vision of a reddit-like to only being able to create those two narrow types of persistent, documentation style information?
In practice this obviously can just be a lemmy community linking to ibis wiki pages maintained by members of that lemmy community, but I wonder if there isn’t an exciting space here to explore what that process could look like if the integration was way tighter and more direct.
I think it is worth considering the argument for splitting a reddit-like from an associated wiki in the first place, why not have them just be two different types of posts, with different associated rules of editing, and two different home pages one that looks like a reddit-like and one that looks like a wiki? Same accounts, same website, same markdown conventions and text/media formatting.
Assuming a bit of careful edit permission handling for a lemmy communities associated wiki, wouldn’t the end result be WAY more powerful of a community resource than a lemmy community and wiki taped together?
I answered a similar question here: lemmy.ml/comment/9329423
Ibis as a Fediverse plug-in - Lemmy
As a long time Wikipedia editor and administrator (might as well get my biases upfront) I am unsure it is a good idea to target Wikipedia. I can understand why, ideologically, this seems like a good idea (and I am sure there’s many a thesis written on its inherent biases) but Wikipedia has the longevity, momentum and sheer weight of users that mean it would be impossible to catch it up and the last point is key because it’s also a vital part of it’s defences against bad actors. That’s not to say it doesn’t have its problems and I haven’t edited in a while (as I was in a place where I didn’t need any extra drama in my life), so it’s good that this tool is out there for people to create an alternative it’s more that I can see better uses for the already impressive wiki software you’ve created. And one key use would be as a plug-in to an existing Fediverse service, rather than a standalone wiki. A while back I suggested that what Lemmy needed was an integrated wiki - I dubbed it Lemmywiks [https://feddit.uk/comment/907540]. I’ve mentioned it a time or two since as it seems the solution to a few issues people have raised. In the meantime I have mulled over the idea (to the point I was rolling my sleeves up to bodge together a proof-of-concept) and it goes a little like this (apologies in advance for the brain-dump): It piggybacks off the Lemmy authentication (why it’s a plug-in not a standalone) and the bulk of the wiki would be divided up under each community. Community wiki pages So: c/hats Would get: w/hats With all the various pages then being under that: w/hats/faqs w/hats/links And really whatever the community requires - some might not need any pages at all. Well they all get one: w/hats Is the main/index page and replaces the text in the community’s sidebar. As they are both markdown it is a straight switch. That sidebar page now becomes the main portal into the community’s pages (if they want any), although you can also add markdown like the wiki links so [[links]] under hats goes to: w/hats/links It’s up to each community to decide what pages it wants and the beauty of a wiki is that it is flexible enough to accommodate most things a community requires. To get around the issue of there not being enough users to monitor edits on pages, I’d suggest they are treated like requests on Github and users can submit edits that Mods would approve or reject. Hopefully, this system would alao encourage communities to recruit more Mods, perhaps even have one or two focused on the wiki. This system of community wikis would, it is hoped, also encourage more single topic focused instances - we have ones for Star Trek, RPGs, books, etc and there’s no reason there couldn’t be ones for Star Wars, films (there was one that is no more), action figures, etc, etc. A greater diversity of instances has to be a good thing. In the comments, people have mentioned that this would be ideal for taking on the wikis/fandom wikis and integrating with focused instances would make this possible. Instance wiki pages In a similar manner, the main sidebar of the instance is also the front page of the instance wiki pages, structured thusly: w/lemmy_world/ These pages would only be editable by the Admins and would largely be for all the various bits of documentation the instance needs - legal and policy as well as a potential breakdown of the instance’s communities by category. For example, I help Admin feddit.uk [http://feddit.uk] and we have communities focused on football clubs, regions, etc. Being able to have: w/feddit_uk/football-communities w/feddit_uk/regional-communities Would really help with discoverablity and may also help with Lemmy’s SEO. Not just Lemmy My original idea was a wiki plug-in for Lemmy because I am on here the most, and Ibis coming from one of the Lemmy devs makes this an even better test case. However, it would work equally well for other services. Obviously the above structure would be what is required for kbin/kbin but it could be of use for Mastodon (especially instances with a specific focus) or pretty much any Fediverse service, if only for being a repository for their documentation. As I’ve said, the flexibility of a wiki means that, once you give people the tools they can take it off in any direction they require. People have questioned why Ibis needs to be federated at all, but it becomes vital when Ibis is a plug-in to other services rather than standalone. For example, I Mod communities on lemmy.world as well as my home instance and I could edit wikis on all communities from my main account. I probably forgot some stuff but that should be enough to chew over for now.