[Imc-alternatives] decentralising Indymedia services

[strypey at riseup.net]

Kia ora

I started to write this months ago. Aaron K's post about the
decentralized potential of the ActivismNetwork software reminded me of it.

Magius wrote:

>> All to say that, imho, "common services" are strategic for a network.
If we have not them...there's not a network.. <<


I think we are actually saying the same thing in different words.
Obviously I would like to see Indy tech develop in a way that keeps
everything thoroughly interconnected, so data can be sorted, filtered
and aggregated by the user. But "common services" and "distributed
services" are not mutually exclusive.

Look at the internet protocol itself - distributed nodes connected by a
common protocol that is plaftorm agnostic (any hardware, running any OS,
running any application, can connect and use it). The key to distributed
networking is that the nodes (be they computers, people, or CMS
applications):
a) are willing to communicate - listening
b) are able to communicate - the means: ethernet, voice box or an open
internet connection respectively
c) have a common symbol system - the words: protocals (eg TCP/IP),
spoken language (eg Spanish), what Aaron K calls 'web services' (eg
Jabber, RSS, irc, ftp etc)

Web services connect web servers, through web apps running on them. Web
apps can share data through web services (email, ftp, irc etc) but many
of the dominant ones like Google Search, YouTube or MySpace are what he
calls data silos - hoarding their data on one private server (or
cluster). One of our Aotearoa geeks suggested defining microformats
(http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page) as a basis for creating open
web services.

Server-side reality is big chunks of website are a drain on the server
they are sitting on and vulnerable to attack. The more you can spread
the load of services and distribute mirrors and backups of databases the
better. Remember the original principle of the web/ HTML was to separate
content from display. How about an Indymedia CMS that stores its
database in a FreeNet style cluster of separate servers in different
countries and keeps a cached HTML version of the latest front page,
newswire page etc? Peering servers rather than home users would provide
a more powerful and hopefully more reliable network than FreeNet.

Would this be possible using a CMS like Drupal? Seems to me you'd just
have to reconfigure it to connect a database engine, connected to the
distributed database, rather than to MySQL or whatever. The publishing
system and anything else that altered pages would update a static cache
at the same time as being saved to the database.

RnB
Strypes

magius wrote:
> 2006/11/11, Danyl Strype <strypey at riseup.net>:
>   
>> For example perhaps it would make sense
>> for every IMC site to have its own wiki (all linked somehow) instead
>> of trying to maintain one HUGE wiki like docs.indymedia.org with its
>> constant issues. Perhaps other functions like chat (irc), lists etc
>> that are currently crammed on one overloaded server and collective
>> each could be similarly decentralised.
>>     
>
> I totally disagree with this approach. In these days @ Italy Indymedia
> we're discussing if continue to make indymedia. Jeff from Ahimsa
> infact announced he doesn't want to continue to host Italy Indymedia
> (and other IMCs) on his server, so is under discussion if Italy
> Indymedia will continue to exist. During this discussion, emerged some
> proposals. One of these, that I support, is to split the italian IMC
> in many thematic/local affinity groups each with his website. The
> "national" site will be a sort of RSS feeds' collection from networked
> thematic/local italian blogs, both for features (blogs features) and
> newswire (blogs' comments). Imho this proposal could be extended to
> Indymedia at all. All these "federated blogs" will have some shared
> "collaboration tools" common to ALL world imcs. Lists
> (lists.indymedia.org), wiki (docs.indymedia.org), translation tool
> (translations.indymedia.org), chat (irc.indymedia.org), links like
> del.icio.us (links.indymedia.org to be created), agenda like
> protest.net (agenda.indymedia.org to be created). All these "common
> services" can be shared by each website through RSS and all blogs
> themselves linked in a common national website also through RSS...
>
> All to say that, imho, "common services" are strategic for a network.
> If we have not them...there's not a network..
>
> magius
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