Is there any decentralized software similar to MusicBrainz or booru-style image boards for collaboratively tagging various media files (music, movies, books, images, etc.) without the need for a centralized database? I’m looking for something where users can contribute metadata and tags in a peer-to-peer fashion.
While I understand that such a decentralized system may result in messy or unreliable metadata due to the lack of curation, I’m willing to accept that trade-off. Sometimes, having any metadata available, even if it’s imperfect, is better than having no information at all about a particular file, especially when I don’t remember the details myself.
I’d be grateful if anyone could recommend existing software or projects that fit this decentralized, collaborative tagging approach, even if it’s a proof-of-concept or works for only a specific media type like music or images. The key requirement is the absence of a central database or authority, with metadata being crowdsourced and distributed across a peer-to-peer network.
It’s technically viable, using a distributed hash table for example. But I’m not aware of any solution that does it.
You still need a reputation system otherwise your DHT will get filled with spam. BitTorrent doesn’t have this problem because the file you download either matches the hash or it doesn’t. But you can’t use DHT for things like search or tagging unless you have some way to weed out bad submissions (sybil attack). Either a curated centralized database or a blockchain are the two known ways to solve this problem.