Fediverse

@nutomic Looks like an interesting project!

Will there be a mobile-friendly version of the front end?

And will you be able to follow Ibis pages (or perhaps edit them?) from Mastodon? Or potentially even Lemmy?

Yeah, well. Why was I not surprised when I read its made by a lemmy dev. You guys rock.

This is a great project. I had the same idea myself, and posted about it, but never did anything about it! It's great that people like you are here, with the creativity, and the motivation and skills to do this work.

I think this project is as necessary as Wikipedia itself.

The criticisms in these comments are mostly identical to the opinion most people had about Wikipedia when it started - the it would become a cesspool of nonsense and misinformation. That it was useless and worthless when encyclopaedias already exist.

Wikipedia was the first step in broadening what a source if authoritative information can be. It in fact created richer and more truthful information than was possible before, and enlightened the world. Ibis is a necessary second step on the same path.

It will be most valuable for articles like Tieneman square, or the Gilets Jaunes, where there are sharply different perspectives on the same matter, and there will never be agreement. A single monolithic Wikipedia cannot speak about them. Today, wiki gives one perspective and calls it the truth. This was fine in the 20th century when most people believed in simple truths. They were told what to think by single sources. They never left their filter bubbles. This is not sustainable anymore.

To succeed and change the world, this project must do a few things right.

1. The default instance should just be a mirror of Wikipedia. This is the default source of information on everything, so it would be crazy to omit it. Omitting it means putting yourself in competition with it, and you will lose. By encompassing it, the information in Ibis is from day 1 greater then wiki. Then Ibis will just supersede wiki.

2. There should be a sidebar with links to the sane article on other instances. So someone reading about trickle down economics on right wing instance, he can instantly switch to the same article on a left wing wiki and read the other side of it. That's the feature that will make it worthwhile for people.

3. It should look like Wikipedia. For familiarity. This will help people transition.

Interesting project and good luck on this.

Did you not consider something like Codeberg to host this? Many open source devs do not trust MS or their stewardship of Github, and considering the aim of this project is against American control of information, surely this really needs serious consideration.

Many open source devs do not want to use Github at all now.

What could possibly go wrong!

First of all I welcome this idea, and think it's ok if there's many different types of encyclopaedia on different perspectives. Now, how will a decentralised wiki deal with something like a rando claiming to be uni professor and inserting thyself in admin position over time? How is activitypub helpful in writing wiki?(Edit credits?)

Finally a site you might find helpful: https://wikiindex.org/ (https://web.archive.org/wikiindex.org/ as it seems to be down)

Looks very broken on mobile.