If this is the wrong place to pose this question, point me in the right direction
I discovered ZeroNet well before the pandemic and the concept was attracting, although, I admit, it was hard to adapt and everything felt… unfinished.
Because life happens, I eventually forgot about it and moved on to other waters, Reddit included.
With the current debacle of Reddit and other social sites/networks, I started wondering if ZeroNet or a fork of it could propose an alternative/add on to the growing Fediverse?
Running and maintainning an instance of any network is easy to realize that is highly time and resource consuming. I myself was forced to sign up to another instance because the one running in my country is constantly having issues.
By contrast, I never faced this sort of constraints when I was a user of ZeroNet. There wasn’t anything even remotly resembling the reddit format or facebook but you could find a good deal of diversity there.
There was also the possibility of publishing/hosting your own webpage with no need to resort to hosting services, subscribe to mailling lists, cross link to external sources, etc.
It’s not that I dislike the current fediverse: I have a Mastodon account and I’m here as well. But are we doing it all wrong?
From the perspective of someone with addmitidly very low technical knowledge, the current state of distributed social networks feels fragile, comparing with the alternative of having a truly distributed network where every user acts as a server themselves.
Please share your thoughts.
It’s still alive (on alternative repos), but it still has glaring issues : as decentralized as it wants to be, it still relies on centralized services (or “zites”, 0net’s own lingo) to manage authentication, for instance.
Apparently, that is one of the goals. I have this feeling that the hard association with cryptocurrency took a serious toll to the project.
Never heard of it, when was it a thing?
The possibility to host a site, a blog or anything else straight from my computer and hard drive, with no need for servers just felt right.
Doesn’t that mean that won’t work while your computer is shut down?
Yes and no.
Because the entire concept runs around bittorrent, as long as there is someone else seeding your content, it is out there and for the same reason it doesn’t require that much resouces.
I was considering assembling a RPi, just for running ZeroNet, then.
