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I'm found myself with some free time and wanted to do something useful for society. i always used to love the old gab dissenter extension, https://github.com/gab-ai-inc/gab-dissenter-extension . for those who don't know, it's an extension for your browser allowing you to comment on any web page.

i thought it was gaining popularity until the major browsers all blocked it and gab seemed to have given up on it. it's main website, dissenter.com, now redirects to trends.gab.com and the source code hasn't been updated since 2019.

i want to do an overhaul to make it work more robustly so it can't be removed so easily. obviously, the browsers can still ban the extension, but can't prevent it from being installed directly outside of their little controlled app stores. dissenter.com going poof seemed to be the thing that really killed it, so i was thinking of allowing multiple hosts for comments. maybe anonymous login, as well. i was also thinking of something more exotic like supporting servers on the tor network, or even using some p2p protocol.

what do you guys think? have any good ideas as to ways i could make the extension more robust and immune to censorship? anyone with a technical background know of any protocol that would be a good fit for the comment system? any ideas about how to handle users? should there be a traditional user signup, or should it allow you to just choose any name, like an irc channel, etc.?

i want to make it as free and open as possible with no one having the ability to censor anything on it. my initial idea is to allow upvotes/downvotes/reports of comments, but treat it exactly as it is, just data. in other words, you can see the number of downvotes/upvotes/reports on the comments written but can configure your app to decide what to do with that information. if you want your app to censor reported things, you can do so, if not you don't have to.

i have no experience with browser extensions, but after a few hours i was able to get it compiled from source and running in my chromium based browser. it seems to work at least a little, displaying old comments on some pages, but doesn't allow me to login/signup. i put a screenshot of the extension in the comments (for some reason poal is converting all my urls to lowercase resulting in a 404 when i put them in the text)

I'm found myself with some free time and wanted to do something useful for society. i always used to love the old gab dissenter extension, https://github.com/gab-ai-inc/gab-dissenter-extension . for those who don't know, it's an extension for your browser allowing you to comment on any web page. i thought it was gaining popularity until the major browsers all blocked it and gab seemed to have given up on it. it's main website, dissenter.com, now redirects to trends.gab.com and the source code hasn't been updated since 2019. i want to do an overhaul to make it work more robustly so it can't be removed so easily. obviously, the browsers can still ban the extension, but can't prevent it from being installed directly outside of their little controlled app stores. dissenter.com going poof seemed to be the thing that really killed it, so i was thinking of allowing multiple hosts for comments. maybe anonymous login, as well. i was also thinking of something more exotic like supporting servers on the tor network, or even using some p2p protocol. what do you guys think? have any good ideas as to ways i could make the extension more robust and immune to censorship? anyone with a technical background know of any protocol that would be a good fit for the comment system? any ideas about how to handle users? should there be a traditional user signup, or should it allow you to just choose any name, like an irc channel, etc.? i want to make it as free and open as possible with no one having the ability to censor anything on it. my initial idea is to allow upvotes/downvotes/reports of comments, but treat it exactly as it is, just data. in other words, you can see the number of downvotes/upvotes/reports on the comments written but can configure your app to decide what to do with that information. if you want your app to censor reported things, you can do so, if not you don't have to. i have no experience with browser extensions, but after a few hours i was able to get it compiled from source and running in my chromium based browser. it seems to work at least a little, displaying old comments on some pages, but doesn't allow me to login/signup. i put a screenshot of the extension in the comments (for some reason poal is converting all my urls to lowercase resulting in a 404 when i put them in the text)

(post is archived)

[–] • 10 pts

Do it. They banned this because they feared its power. Reanimate the corpse so I can write nigger where I'm not supposed to. :D

[–] • 4 pts (edited )

>for some reason poal is converting all my urls to lowercase

It's bad practice to have capital letters in your urls, to begin with https://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls

#13: Be wary of case sensitivity A couple years back, John Sherrod of Search Discovery wrote an excellent piece noting the challenges and issues around case-sensitivity in URLs. Long story short—if you're using Microsoft/IIS servers, you're generally in the clear. If you're hosting with Linux/UNIX, you can get into trouble as they can interpret separate cases, and thus randswhisky.com/AbC could be a different piece of content from randswhisky.com/aBc. That's bad biscuits.

https://www.searchdiscovery.com/blog/case-sensitive-urls-and-seo-case-matters/

[–] • 4 pts

and thus randswhisky.com/AbC could be a different piece of content from randswhisky.com/aBc. That's bad biscuits.

The spec is for URL contents to be case-sensitive, and the only reason Windows operates that way is because its file systems operate as case-insensitive. IOW, when Windows is asked by the http server to open "fiLe.html", it will interpret "File.html" as the same file.

Note that the spec for domain names is case-insensitive, so that part of the URL acts differently.

[–] • 0 pt

Complain to pic8.co then. That's the url they gave me when I uploaded the pic

[–] • 3 pts (edited )

I've been thinking about how awesome a tool like that would be. I had no idea such a thing existed, been searching for one but never found it. So I am happy to hear about it.

I don't know how dissenter works (have not read repo or site yet), but how I've imagined such a tool would work is that paired with every comment the user can add a css-selector (or similar), this would allow the user of the tool to see exactly the place in the webpage that the comment was aimed at, perhaps the comments could even be displayed inline in the page itself collapsed/expanded. Maybe the extension already had such functionality? From screenshots it looks like Dissenter also had a live chat!

Wish you good luck. Sounds awesome and highly meaningful.

[–] • 2 pts

I don't know much of what you're talking about but I miss spamming drudge report with gay ass kike.

[–] • 2 pts

This is the most powerful thing we can do to get the free speech ball rolling again. Perhaps let's form an actual group for dev on this, with absolutely zero political or agenda written into the mission statement. Open source it and take donations for some full time coders. It will time but going Blockchain on this would be the final nail to make it stay up.

[–] • 1 pt

We all know why this was hated. It was an easily accessible discussion on any page that they could not censor. It’s one thing for small, independent sites outside their control to talk about them from the sidelines. It’s quite another to have it effectively on your site.

I don’t know what control Gab had over this, but in the long term I can see a problem with spammers abusing the hell out of it if it has no moderation at all. Even 4chan has moderators and web application firewalls to delete or block outright spam.

[–] • 2 pts

Ability of users to block other users, and limit the number of accounts a user can have or create in a space of time so that they can't just create more accounts to get around that they've been blocked by other users.

[–] • 1 pt

Yea, I'm afraid of spam of, too. I'm thinking for the first version, I'm just going to the simplest possible thing, so I can get it running quickly. I'll just make it so anyone can run a server and you can add multiple servers within the extension. Then it'll be up to the server how to handle filtering spam. Maybe I can get some people already running forums involved to run servers and filter out spam since they know how to do it already. Maybe the owner of poal.co would be interested?

[–] • 1 pt

I was a big fan of dissenter and would think it a great day to resurrect it.

[–] • 1 pt

I was too. It seemed to be the only thing big tech was really afraid of. Although I don't know why gab shut it down, I want to make this version with multiple interconnected servers anyone can run to help make sure it stays up.