I keep feeling frustrated as valuable knowledge for my different hobbies over the last years became siloed away in corporate social media. I believe wikis could be a way out, but can we have decentralized, federated wiki software that can kind of talk among each other?
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Any community can host their own wiki using the software used by Wikipedia, the WikiMedia software even has very basic support for federation.
An example is the MCO wiki, a specific wiki dedicated to the MCO Minecraft server.
Yeah, to be clear, MediaWiki is open source and also has alllll sorts of really cool extensions. You also already can download the entire contents of Wikipedia.
I think this desire to federate everything is going too far. Most things don’t benefit from this and in fact just become over complicated. If you can host a regular copy of a site easily… that’s frankly most of the benefits there.
I’m not sure federation is that important on sites that aren’t built around socializing. I think it is sufficient for a wiki to provide a good export mechanism so that it can be archived or mirrored by others.
I could see a setup where each server is a separate wiki around a specific topic, and federation allows people from other servers to edit or comment/discuss. Pretty much like Fandom but federated. It would be beneficial in that people wouldn’t have to make a login for every wiki they follow, and may help discoverability.
This is what I mean. Lots of small wikis, like subreddits, like the old forums, only that a wiki setup seem to me a better way to collect and present knowledge than the forums, mailing lists, facebook groups, subreddits or wherever we used to put our stuff.
I’ve used Gitit for that. The backing store is Git so all git’s distributed VCS capabilities are there too. If you run Debian, apt install gitit should set it up for you.
Git seems to be a good way to approach this. It’s funny that I never really had to get around to what Git actually is (some thingy to store files for programmer teams?). For a somewhat technophile but non-IT person it’s all a bit overwhelming.
Yeah, git is complicated and having a synchronized gitit across multiple servers would be kind of a pain to set up. Maybe someone could package that to make it easier. Or Lemmy could add a federated wiki just like Reddit has a wiki.
It occurs to me, you could also look at Fossil (fossil-scm.org). It is also mostly intended as a VCS, but it has a wiki built in, and it is quite easy to set up. Again though, idk about the setup for keeping multiple servers synchronized.
