An old thread on zzzchan about decentralized imageboards and forums:
https://zzzchan.xyz/tech/thread/845.html
https://archive.is/MTVrO
>Lately I've been interested in looking for a final solution to the imageboard problem, deplatforming and relying on centralized authorities for hosting. P2P through TOR seems like the most logical path forward. But the software would also need to be accessible, easily installed and understood by just about anyone, and easily secure/private by default.
>Retroshare seemed like a decent choice, but unfortunately its forum function is significantly lacking in features. I haven't investigate too much into zeronet either but from what I recall that was a very bloated piece of software and I'm looking for something that's light and simple. Then there's BitChan (>507) which fits most of the bill but contrasted with Retroshare is not simple to setup.
>I know there is essentially nothing else out there so this thread isn't necessarily asking to be spoonfed some unknown piece of software that went under the radar of anons. But I think the concept of P2P imageboards should be further explored even though the failure of zeronet soured a lot of peoples perspective on the concept. Imageboards are so simple by nature I feel this shouldn't be as difficult as it is. Retroshare comes close but as I understand it you can't really moderate the forums that you create. Plus the media integration is basically non-existent, though media is a lesser concern. But having everything routed through tor and being able to mail, message, and have public forums all in a single small client available on every operating system is the kind of seamlessness that a program needs for widespread adoption.
[Edited to prevent invalid links]
A decent amount of the discussion is technologically obsolete, especially regarding cryptography, but if there are aspects anons want to pull out of that, I'd like to know. For self-serving reasons, I'm going to pull out this later post (14501) regarding the web:
>The main problem is the web is centralized by nature. They later added stupid kludges like cuckflare, amazon, etc. to offload traffic, but that doesn't change the fact there is a single point of failure (when the origin web site goes offline, or gets "deplatformed" like 8chan).
>On top of that, the web is attrociously bloated, which is another reason the kludges got the traction they did. And all that bloat for what exactly, when you don't even have a stardard/easy means to do what >14496 is asking. No, instead you have to build more shit on top of the huge steaming pile of shit.
>But all this used to be really simple. On Usenet you'd subscribe to a newsgroup, and then every time you connect to your local server, it downloads the new messages. Then when you open your newsreader to one of those groups, you see all the new posts, threaded in whichever way *you* want them to be. You could even download all the new posts to your computer, a bit like POP3 for email (because they're also just text messages with headers). Now you have a local archive, whithout having to write convoluted scripts for parsing/scraping html/js and updating them when something changes on the server (and they don't get blocked one day when cuckflare decides your script is a bot).
>And threads never expired! You could reply to a thread from a year ago, or even longer, if you had archived one of its posts (technically all you need are the headers).
>And if you think a discussion is getting off-topic, you can split it into a new thread! (or even cross-post to a different newsgroup). Yeah that doesn't work at all on web imageboard or forum, despite their huge code size. So what really are they even good for, except taking up resources? Oh right, they're excellent at tracking and spying on you, and also good for hacking into your computer via one of countless bugs.
It's hard to say whether or not the later ideas are right or wrong, since more options aren't always better, but some of the people working on Lynxchan may have interesting things to say about the web.