decentralised how?

[torkus]

hiya,

I develop another f/oss wow addon manager here: https://github.com/ogri-la/wowman

The thought did occur while developing that a decentralised network would be nice but that curseforge.com, while centralised and proprietary and for-profit and closed source and all the rest, do have the resources to curate and moderate the addons they host.

I'm curious what your thoughts are on:

• what sort of decentralisation ... ? addon authors would self host or bittorrent or ... ? curation implies centralisation
• dealing with malware.
• is there necessary momentum? do enough people care or is that not the point?
• and if that isn't the point, what guarantee is there it would last any meaningful amount of time?

I think it's a noble idea, but would require real energy and time and effort of individual people to maintain.

[khlam]

Hey, I’m glad to see other open source projects! Keep it up!

1. This idea was sprouted a few months ago and we didn’t develop it.
   My idea to decentralize addon distribution while respecting other developer’s software rights was to mimic host-file sharing. https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts
   Where all users maintain their personal addon list (manifest) and choose to share their manifest if they want.
   The idea:
   a) As a user installs addons, World of Addons generates a file called addons.json which contains meta-data about the addon (name, version, file names, authors, URL).

   b) addons.json can be backed-up/shared, allowing multiple computers to synchronize their installations

   c) WoA would compile addons.json into a minimal list (manifest) that the user can publicly post to github or something.
   Other users could import said manifest into their local WoA client.
   Each manifest would be keyword-searchable, allowing the user to search for addons that they don’t already have installed within their local WoA client.

   d) The manifest hosted in this repo is considered “curated” because it would have served as the default manifest, it would have listed all GPL-licensed addons hosted on github such as https://github.com/WeakAuras. (This feature in dev that hasn’t been merged yet supports installing compiled addons directly from github. https://github.com/WorldofAddons/worldofaddons/tree/dev)

2. Malware is an issue that the system does not address because installing any addon is entirely voluntary.
   Installing any addon from any source is up to the user’s judgment, our goal here was to design a system that is opt-in only so bad actors don’t affect others.

3. Momentum to continue is an issue.
   I suspect the majority of WoW players would agree that the Curse client sucks, but I don’t think anyone would want to swap to a new client.
   This may be the case because many WoW players either do not use addons, are really used to the Curse client, or just manually install their addons.
   I personally don't care whether people use this or not, thinking about this stuff is fun :)