It’s been a few days since I opposed the closing of the ticket opened for FedWikis. On the one hand, Ward Cunningham has stated that the system should be useable without JavaScript. But it seems he neither wants to work on that, nor help me to work it out.

The discussion within the issue had become long. Too long for an issue. But as Ward tries to do his documentation in FedWikis and those are not accessible without Javascript, that was the way to communicate. Which wasn’t very straight-forward, as I slowly found out more about FedWikis. I discussed some of that within earlier posts.

In the end it seemed to me, that the principles would be just right though. User-centered federation seems right. The way it’s currently done is within a Javascript client with the need to execute JavaScript from all involved sites. Sounds like a security-nightmare to me. But as the majority seems not to have no sensibility for security at all, I can understand how people come to creating such things. But it’s only fine with me, if I can use it in a sensible way.

So the current version is not useable for me. The functionality seems to be all there, though. Seemed to me I would have just needed to get the JavaScript be executed on the server, so that “one’s server” is the only thing one needs to trust and that this can do the federation activities on an ongoing basis (continously).

So will I go ahead and do it all myself? Actually, no, I probably will not. It sounds like a lot of work and I dislike the way that FedWikis open their tabs. I think it would be much better to base the same mechanisms on “usual” web-content that also works without specific clients and in the way users are used to “the Web”. I’d rather look further into the mechanism behind this blog (Jekyll generating pages). A script to allow visitors to propose a modifcation (let’s say be mail?) and deal with according proposals shouldn’t be that hard to do. Putting the sources on a git wouldn’t be that hard either. Do get some automatic syncing done then (git doing pulls by cron-job + check + display) also sounds doable. So if I would do this from scratch, I probably would attempt that way.

But well, in conclusion it seems the goal of FedWikis is not I wanted. Albeit various according statements. But whatever it is, that they are not telling me there. It just doesn’t sound like it would be worth investing more into this without any backup by the devs there.

ClearNet-Links:

  • https://github.com/fedwiki/wiki/issues/62#issuecomment-156747255