It could be done without having to clone all data though. Reddit is hosted by AWS and their data is distributed on multiple servers, so replace AWS by a bunch of people like you and me providing disk space for the data and tada, you can decentralized the database and just give people access to interacting with it directly (through code) or via various front-ends that people would create.
From a user perspective the front-end they use would be like Reddit before the API bullshit, it’s just them using an app or a website to make things look good, but they have access to everything that’s in the database and they’re using the same credentials no matter which front-end they use.
The difference with Reddit is that since the hosts are just that, hosts to the data, they don’t have admin power over users. They can filter the data that’s hosted on their servers (like admins need to do now) but that content might be hosted by another server instead and they can’t ban a user from the website itself since they don’t control it (hence the crypto analogy, you can run a node, but it’s just you adding one more server to the bunch, you don’t have any real power over what’s happening).
It could be done without having to clone all data though. Reddit is hosted by AWS and their data is distributed on multiple servers, so replace AWS by a bunch of people like you and me providing disk space for the data and tada, you can decentralized the database and just give people access to interacting with it directly (through code) or via various front-ends that people would create.
From a user perspective the front-end they use would be like Reddit before the API bullshit, it’s just them using an app or a website to make things look good, but they have access to everything that’s in the database and they’re using the same credentials no matter which front-end they use.
The difference with Reddit is that since the hosts are just that, hosts to the data, they don’t have admin power over users. They can filter the data that’s hosted on their servers (like admins need to do now) but that content might be hosted by another server instead and they can’t ban a user from the website itself since they don’t control it (hence the crypto analogy, you can run a node, but it’s just you adding one more server to the bunch, you don’t have any real power over what’s happening).