Ask HN: How do we solve the decentralized social network issue?
I've been studying on these decentralized services and learned that like a lot of types of web apps, there are a bunch of them claiming "we made the best service!" Personally, I would love for a decentralized social network to get traction, and I think the only think close enough is status.net/identi.ca (with about a million users on identi.ca). Ironically, app.net is obviously the most famous because they dared charge money. Can we developers unite under one service?
2 comments
The hardest part of such a thing is getting adoption. Commercial players in the space have incentives to push their own offerings very hard. Technologically, there have been a number of fully distributed and decentralized systems. Financially, I guess nobody has really had enough incentive to popularize one.
For you not to run away with the idea and greedily patent it, I'd just tell you to ride on the bittorrent protocol.