Decentralized imageboard. . I'm building a decentralized imageboard on Freenet (aka Hyphanet). Posts go through one of several "moderators" of your choosing, everything is stored in a decentralized fashion.. . Why bother:. forced an

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Anonymous 03-07-26 13:35:57 No.33636

Decentralized imageboard

I'm building a decentralized imageboard on Freenet (aka Hyphanet). Posts go through one of several "moderators" of your choosing, everything is stored in a decentralized fashion.

Why bother:
forced anonymity — there's literally no way to cave and start blocking anonymizers, since the whole thing runs on one
no network effect trap ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect ) — you know the situation: a few massive boards, a bunch of half-dead microboards that go dark every couple months
no mod power trips — a moderator just shares their opinion, and you decide whose opinion to apply, without the pressure of the network effect

Freesite: http://127.0.0.1:8888/freenet:USK@fc5NZ5g6aBhN~aHvcR5QTYWVfsJO747vgY6cC7GZNuY,J~RkZx0JDpEhYwFWWvAA2IBVJCyxkNX9naul6qoKT2Y,AQACAAE/index/-1

How to try it: download and install Freenet — https://www.hyphanet.org/index.html. Then grab (or build) the binary and double-click it — a browser will open with the default board UI, pretty bare-bones. Differences from a normal board: post IDs are very long (they're Freenet keys), and there's a moderator selection feature. If the browser doesn't open on its own: http://127.0.0.1:8891

Heads up: Freenet is PAINFULLY SLOW. Loading and posting take tens of minutes. Everything loads and sends in the background of course, no need to sit staring at a loading screen — it's designed to run in the background while you go about your day, you come back when you feel like it and it's ready to present information immediately.

Posts with images currently go through pre-moderation, so a text-only post will show up to others much faster. This can change down the line; it's a per-moderator setting (and right now I'm the only moderator).

Spam control:
There's optional Argon2 PoW, but it's off for now. Different PoW/captcha options can be added later, the extension points are already there.

About 5k lines of Go+html (no js): ~2k of actual logic, the rest is glue. Builds easily:
go build -o freech

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Glownonymous 03-07-26 21:06:19 No.33653

lovely project idea it seems, I wish I knew more about hyphanet.

Glownonymous 03-07-26 21:10:21 No.33654

>Freenet is PAINFULLY SLOW.
I think you can think of a different decentralization model but it's fine for an experiment I guess. With Freenet, no one will use it daily.

Anonymous 04-07-26 08:03:38 No.33657

File: 1783152218386-6.png (263.21 KB, 1024x1280, 65584278952483103545772c5d….png)

I love the idea! Personally I'd love to see it implemented on I2P, but idk if there are additional hurdles to doing that.
I2P doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves

Anonymous 04-07-26 09:12:40 No.33662

none of the "why bother" answers are very convincing to me, save the last one with a qualification. i mean, fun project i guess but then "to have fun doing a software project" should be a reason. if it's just a means to an end (which most boards are, they're just entertainment) it's more of a blind alley than not.

anonymity has always been overrated in importance (the advantage of imageboards has always been ephemerality + uncertainty, e.g. a board with names but no account system where you can alter your name would get most of the same benefits. IDs are bad because they reduce uncertainty, but /leftypol/ in particular found a fun synthesis by allowing flags which reduce ideological uncertainty while retaining some identity-based uncertainty), the way the network effect trap is avoided appears to be to avoid benefiting from network effects at all, e.g. to create a dead board. (the dead board problem isn't actually the fault of network effects, it's the fault of a "build it and they will come" attitude that fails to benefit from network effects. no they won't! you make new boards when the demand for the subject matter exceeds the capacity of the main board or when a board meeting that subject matter shut-down, not to "induce demand"! this is why nearly all /leftypol/'s alt-boards are flops.) and good moderator taste is essential to a well-functioning imageboard, which is essentially curated. (e.g. sometimes rule-breaking threads are fun and should be left up, other times perfectly within-rules threads are tedious quicksand that should be obliterated. the problem is not moderation, but bad/incompetent moderation.)

that makes the last idea interesting, however. being able to choose which mods taste to have applied is, perhaps, one solution to the problem that moderators are quite likely to have their tastes change at a different rate to yours. but for this to be effective i think you need to have a board of some scale - otherwise you're just shrinking an already tiny pool of potential replies and threads.

I can't comment on the software, but I am about 80% sure OP was mostly written with an LLM. I make no judgements about this fact, I only include my speculation to see if I'm right.

Unique IPs: 4