Not sure what the use case is for a federated wiki. It lets you… edit a different wiki with your account from your initial one? View pages from other wikis using your preferred website’s UI? Know which wikis are considered to have good info by the admins of the wiki you’re browsing from?

This is presented as a solution to Wikipedia’s content moderation problems, but it doesn’t do much against that that wouldn’t also be done by just having a bunch of separate, non-federated wikis that link to each others’ pages. The difference between linking to a wiki in the federation network, and linking to one outside the federation network, is that the ui will be different and you’d have to make a new account to edit things.

I suppose it makes sense for a search feature? You can search for a concept and select the wiki which approaches the concept from your desired angle (e.g. broad overview, scientific detail, hobbyist), and you’d know that all the options were wikis that haven’t been defederated and likely have some trustworthiness. With the decline of google and search engines in general, I can see this being helpful. But it relies on the trustworthiness of your home wiki’s admin, and any large wiki would likely begin to have many of the same problems that the announcement post criticizes Wikipedia for. And all this would likely go over the head of any average visitor, or average editor.

I don’t know. I’m happy this exists. I think it’s interesting to think about what structures would lead to something better than Wikipedia. I might find it helpful once someone creates a good frontend for it, and then maybe the community can donate to create a free hosting service for Ibis wikis. Thank you for making it.

This one made me laugh. Most I just find to be novel, silly, or interesting, but a fair few are pretty funny to me.

Hexbear only recently started opening itself up to federation. It’s one of the old leftist instances that was around before the reddit api fiasco. Think lemmygrad but more tolerant and pro-lgbtq.

Huh, okay. Good on you for being consistent.

I find the banning of individual users to be highly necessary, to prevent spam of porn/nazi shit/general assholery. Instead of everyone having to spend a long time forming their own blocklist, they can sign up for an instance with a mod team that they trust to do it for them. Defederation is a useful tool towards that end, because (for example) Exploding Heads is an instance that explicitly allows racism and such, so a well-moderated instance will defederate with them rather than having to ban hundreds or thousands of individual trolls who sign up over there because they like racism.

Are you also against the idea of banning individual users for the content they post?