Ibis, a federated Wikipedia alternative

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Technical model & federation

  • Ibis uses ActivityPub to sync articles between instances via ordered diffs, with Git‑style conflict resolution rather than CRDTs.
  • Several argue CRDTs are overkill for wikis, since concurrent real‑time editing is rare and semantic conflicts still require humans.
  • Others worry that automatic, CRDT‑style merging could silently produce nonsensical or semantically wrong articles.
  • Some commenters say this is not meaningfully different from “just the web” plus links and existing identity protocols; others point out federation adds interoperable protocols, decouples content from any single server, and can enable “forked but still synchronized” wikis.

Comparison to Wikipedia

  • Many see Wikipedia as a “wonder of the world” and believe replacing it is unnecessary or unrealistic.
  • The launch article’s reliance on old scandals is criticized; some argue Wikipedia’s track record compares favorably to almost any project of its size.
  • Others highlight serious issues: toxic editing culture in some areas, entrenched “kingdoms” of power users, harsh newcomer experience, and exclusion via notability policies.

Moderation, bias, and trust

  • Skeptics question how federation improves trustworthiness; it may just create many biased, conflicting versions of the same topic.
  • Some see that plurality as a feature: different instances can reflect different viewpoints rather than one “official” truth.
  • There is extensive debate over moderation vs. censorship, the inevitability of corruption in centralized institutions, and whether decentralization meaningfully mitigates it.
  • Several note that unsolved social problems (politics, bias, harassment) won’t be fixed by protocol changes.

Practical concerns & UX

  • Major criticism: the demo site renders very poorly on mobile and doesn’t work without JavaScript; this undermines claims of being a serious Wikipedia alternative.
  • It currently has almost no content; people expect at least an import or sync from Wikipedia.
  • Importing Wikipedia wikitext is non‑trivial because of heavy template and Lua usage.

Use cases, alternatives, and viability

  • Some see more promise in federated or specialized wikis (local communities, fandom, deep technical domains) than in a general encyclopedia replacement.
  • Existing solutions cited: self‑hosted MediaWiki, Miraheze, wiki.gg, file‑based wikis with rsync, IPFS/Kiwix, and topic‑focused wikis.
  • Several note that previous Wikipedia forks and “alt‑wikis” rarely achieve critical mass; sustaining content requires a large, ongoing editor base, possibly even paid editors.