[ue_]

I wanted to implement a distribured imageboard over bittorrent but I quickly realised it's hard to add data after the initial publication, and further to verify it, and the nature of trackers may make it prone to censorship. So I gave up.

[the8472]

> but I quickly realised it's hard to add data after the initial publication

combining BEPs 46 and 50 enables rapid updates of torrents, but they are fairly new and there are no implementation designed with low latency in mind. Most bittorrent implementations focus on large amounts of data and throughput, so this use-case is not well served in practice even though the protocol could support it now.

[wongarsu]

Distributing the images/posts via bittorrent and the relations between them in the DHT might be the way to go with such a project.

On the other hand, the an uncensorable imageboard would profit from the verifiable timestamping of a blockchain, with just the images distributed via a bittorrent-like mechanism. That also gives you a decent anti-spam mechanism (you can post in exchange for mining blocks, similar to the original idea of hash-cash)

[ue_]

I thought about this too, but one of the features of imageboards is that it doesn't splinter into subthreads, there's a big list of posts, unlike Reddit. And because a post can reply to multiple posts at once, you can't separate them in blockchain forks. If the blockchain forks, it becomes hard to reference posts in the other forks from any particular fork.

On the other hand, there has to be a way to avoid downloading (and sharing) certain parts of the chain, for example if someone uploads illegal content, they should have the option to never download that data, so I like the idea of keeping images separate.

For posting to be feasible, the time to mine has to be low, though of course it'll increase over time, meaning that either shorter blockchains are favoured for ease of use (nobody wants to wait 5 minutes and waste a lot of power just to make a post) but long enough to make them hard to forge.

There's also the issue of segmentation; there's an interest in certain users wanting not to share certain posts, for example people against political issue X may not want to share posts about X. With a small number of peers, this could mean that only one or two peers keeps track of the posts talking about issue X. And then you'd have to trust that you're not downloading illegal content from those people, so if you are committed to anti-censorship but also don't want to download illegal content, you have to trust those peers to only remove illegal content.

In the end, I'm not sure if it comes out better than NNTP, or even centralised discussion boards with multiple independent archive sites available (which can archive posts before they are deleted by moderators).

[rmc]

Have you seen ipfs? It might do part of what you want...