Ibis is a federated online encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia. Users can read, create and edit articles seamlessly across instances. It uses the Activitypub protocol to connect users across different websites, similar to Mastodon or Lemmy. This ensures that there is no single point of control which may be used for global censorship. Instead each Ibis instance is independent and controlled by its admin. Admins can decide which rules to enforce, which content to allow and which instances to connect with. Users who are unhappy with the rules can easily setup their own Ibis instance with their own rules.
Built by the developer who built Lemmy, from the launch announcement:
I have worked on Lemmy for the past four years, bringing it from a prototype to a fully functional Reddit alternative. I wrote the entire federation code and became very familiar with the protocol. I realized that the same technology easily be used to create a federated encyclopedia. As no one else took up such a project, I finally decided to do it on my own and create Ibis. Thanks to my previous experience with the tech stack and the ActivityPub library I created, I was able to complete a proof of concept in a relatively short time of four months. Just like Lemmy, Ibis is built on a stack of PostgreSQL and Rust, in this case with a frontend written in Rust Webassembly. This means it can efficiently run on low-powered servers or scale to high user numbers.
- Usage instructions
- Setup instructions - manual install on a Linux server with root access