I’m too young to have witnessed the birth of Rentry, yes that’s incredible! I wasn’t using the internet at the time and since I’ve been programming and involving myself in online communities Rentry has been a constant: the go-to place to centralise and share knowledge. I recently saw that the website life is at stake financially in your blog post, and I wanted to discuss some of the key point that could maybe mitigate the problem.

First, let’s talk about open-sourcing+federation. Imagine that anyone could host a peer instance of Rentry to synchronise the pages together.

+makes the future of the platform viable & open
+federation is good because accountability is shared so you won’t have to manage everything that happens because moderation can be scaled down to the instance level.
+more resistant to DDOS attacks

-Ensuring that people won’t do crazy shit will require that your scanner is adapted to a federated network: only crawl posts created instances wise, so local moderators delete terrible pages can be a solution to ensure safety while being a feasible option.

  • Can you adapt Rentry current codebase and make it a federated network?

If you’re interested in the idea, I have a rough idea for the steps we can follow:

  1. Open-source the code
  2. Call for actions & contributors to develop federation
  3. Call for action to write documentation & pass the word around

With enough determination this can be made possible !


Secondly, can you also open an ETH address/XMR address for donations so I can keep some anonymity yet help the platform survive?


Thirdly are you sure Patreon is the right place to go to get funding? Apparently, the platform has began the famous process of “enshitment”.

Wouldn’t Ko-Fi be better?

Thanks for reading and have a good day,
-noctis!!

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Pub: 17 Jan 2024 22:46 UTC
Views: 1061