nutomic

Announcing Ibis, the federated Wikipedia Alternative (ibis.wiki)

nutomic, 1 month ago

I dont have time for that, but other people could setup instances which mirror parts of Wikipedia.

nutomic, 1 month ago

You can make a pull request here: github.com/Nutomic/ibis/blob/master/…/ibis.css

nutomic, 1 month ago

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.

nutomic, 1 month ago

Im bad at CSS, contributions welcome: github.com/Nutomic/ibis/blob/master/…/ibis.css

nutomic, 1 month ago

Im not good at frontend development, my goal was to create a very basic frontend which works to show off the project. Going forward I will definitely need help to improve the design or create an entirely new frontend in a different language.

Anyway the main thing about this project is the working federation, but without a basic frontend it would be very difficult to showcase.

nutomic, 1 month ago

Right ibis.wiki wasnt following open.ibis.wiki. I did that now, made an edit and it got federated as expected.

ibis.wiki/article/Lemmy@open.ibis.wiki/history

nutomic, 1 month ago

Nope

nutomic, 1 month ago

Sure if someone implements those things. I personally already invested a lot of time in the project and wont be able to do everything on my own.

nutomic, 1 month ago

Thats a good question. Obviously the first place to look for articles would be those hosted by your local instance. Then the instance admin could also maintain an article with links to relevant articles. And I suppose later there could be some software features for discovery, but I havent thought about that yet.

nutomic, 1 month ago

Adding such functionality in Lemmy would be very complicated because Lemmy itself is already quite a complicated project. So it would require test coverage, pass code review, have a stable API and so on. Its better to experiment with this in a new project so I can write some quick and dirty code to get the basic functionality working. If it proves successful it can be integrated with Lemmy later.

nutomic, 1 month ago

If an instance goes down, the articles are still stored on other federated instances.

nutomic, 1 month ago

Yes true.

nutomic, 1 month ago

Its definitely an experiment and I dont know how it will work in practice. But we have this technology, so I wanted to take advantage of it and let people give it a try. At worst Ibis wont be adopted, then I just wasted a few months of time. At best it could turn into a much better Wikipedia, so the upside potential is huge.

nutomic, 1 month ago

The readme has some basic description how the federation works. Viewing articles from other platforms should be easy to get working. Edits from other platforms would also be possible, but would require changes so that they can generate diffs and resolve conflicts. So not exactly easy.

nutomic, 1 month ago

That structure is extremely corrupted though. And Lemmy shows that volunteers can handle this kind of stuff. Though Ibis will definitely need a lot of mod tools.

nutomic, 1 month ago

I dont speak French and havent heard about that drama. But its about the problems pointed out in this article among others.

If Ibis gets popular it will get listed higher in search results. Same as Lemmy which is also slowly going up in results. Before that it will most likely spread through word of mouth.

nutomic, 1 month ago

I think thats better than having our single “truth” controlled by a corrupt organization from a different country, different language and different culture. With federation there can be independent wikis for my local country or city.

nutomic, 1 month ago

It uses Markdown because it has the best library support.

nutomic, 1 month ago

I was waiting for someone else to create a project like this. But it didnt happen so I had to write it myself when things became a bit calmer with Lemmy.

nutomic, 1 month ago

By allowing users to interact between different wiki instances. Just like you can interact with Lemmy instances from KBin.

What is something lemmy can improve upon?