Decentralised Zotero

What Logos is doing needs a foundation of education, to make people understand that there are alternatives to democracy and historical examples of parallel societies.

Books and other material on those subjects need to be easily accessible to educate people. Censorship-resistance is important to ensure access to the literature.
So is privacy.

BitTorrent is not good enough for this purpose. While it enables access to literature, the cataloging still needs to be done out-of-band (aka, finding magnet links or torrent files). The DHT search helps in this matter, but one can only look for individual files and collections. Mutability is not an option here.

Solution

A concept of library, where one, or several, users can curate a “library” of documents. The link to the library can still happen out-of-band, but the library itself should be mutable.
So that owners can add to the library, or even accept suggestions from users. Meaning once a “link” to a library is shared, it remains valid forever.

A function to “search” library, similar to DHT search, could be useful, but not a day one blocker.

Ideally, the application to use is a one-click-install, probably using Logos Core. So that a user can just install one app, use a library link and get the files from Codex. Coordination most likely can happen over Waku. No web page + installer script should be needed.

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@fryorcraken, I cannot tell you how much I love this idea. I would pay good money for such an application, even for a personal use case. For Logos, this would be amazing.

I use Zotero regularly. Having an app built on Codex with Waku coordination would be legit. However, the app would need solid UI and UX and have all the same and/or better features, especially all of the citation capability.

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This is one of the best use cases I can think about to show what we are up to. A potential pain point for such a successful tool like LibGen is the censorship resistance factor, particularly after Meta is making it more notorious than usual: British authors 'absolutely sick' to discover books on 'shadow library' allegedly used by Meta to train AI | Ents & Arts News | Sky News

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I’m Curious, how did you learn about Zotero? I was introduced to this extension during my university studies at Amsterdam University. I think it’s one of my favorite practical “tips” I took away from the tools they suggested. I continue using it at least weekly as well and promote the extension. I must say though onboarding is not smooth, especially for non techies or someone entirely new. AKA it’s one of those tools you need to be onboarded by a human, at least for now.

Would be beautiful if we built something that anyone who stumbled upon online could just USE IT.

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Yeah, I agree with Migle. It is not always easy to jump into Zotero. Having a cleaner interface with tooltips and a user friendly tutorial would be a critical feature!

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