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)