Comparing FedWiki and Agora

I'm inspired by the way in which FedWiki is described in the section in [[Free, Fair and Alive]] on [[A Platform Designed for Collaboration: Federated Wiki]]. And I feel Agora achieves this same principle, but in a different way.

In some ways better in my opinion - I think [[FedWiki]] is very advanced and does a great job of neighbourhoods, cloning pages and parts of pages, tracing lineage, etc. But it feels a bit like a monoculture - I have no idea how much of it works outside of the FedWiki ecosystem.

Agora on the other hand I see as an aggregator and a bridge of digital gardens. And these digital gardens can be made in whichever way you choose - as long as you can output them in a standard markdown format, they can be pulled in to the Agora. My garden can (and does) live entirely outside of the Agora, in parallel with living inside of it. This is really important.

See: http://vera.wiki.anagora.org/view/comparing-fedwiki-and-agora pull

Log

[2021-11-05 Fri]

• Had a bit of a play with [[FedWiki]] at the farm [[vera]] set up. I'm at http://neil.wiki.anagora.org pull.

  • It is pretty wild, let me tell you. It kind of feels like magic, the way you can navigate links between wikis, and see other pages in your neighbourhood.

  • I feel like I will have some galaxy brain moment when it properly settles in.

  • I could honestly imagine using it as my daily driver for the kind of federation features it offers. But I'm far too tied to local-first editing in org-roam right now. I think it'll take me a while to move from this paradigm.

  • I think this is what [[Agora]] does for me - some of that federated wiki goodness, but just layered on top of what I'm already using - not needing to move elsewhere.

  • FedWiki is far more advanced, but Agora grows all the time and may gain some of these federated features too.

if you're visiting this site you're probably already familiar with fedwiki or [[federated wiki]]. What you might not be as familiar with is [[zettelkasten]] (what the [[agora]] is based on)

I've been having fun comparing these two modalities to find out their respective pros and cons.

fedwiki separates contexts by site, so each site will have a particular context or theme. I also call this a [[vocabulary]]. For example [http://crypto.wiki.anagora.org pull crypto.wiki.anagora.org] is a vocabulary about [[crypto]].

The agora on the other hand is essentially a curated set of zettelkasten selected by the agora maintainer. The agora lacks context, in that, each node or term displays all the available contexts on the same page.

It could be argued that the agora and fedwiki are inverse models of each other.

I think agora would be a good tool to glue all the fedwikis together

they are federated on a page by page basis but there is no underlying matrix connecting them all

for example if i want to learn about [[food]] and look in the agora I can see a bunch of definitions of food (context free), so if I'm writing a fedwiki article I can add information I found in the agora about food (a contrived example)

the agora currently lets you use hostnames for user contexts so its quite possible one of the entries for food is another fedwiki and I can literally just drag and drop from that site, but use the agora as a discovery engine

fedwiki also doesn't seem to suffer as much from the [[data dump]] problem where people just dump a bunch of random crap into a node because "why not?". Example: [https://anagora.org/raw/garden/jakeisnt/pages/music.org pull this subnode] in the agora for "music"