Ask HN: How do we solve the decentralized social network issue?

2 points by mehrzad 13y ago ↗ HN

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

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dragonbonheur 13y ago ↗

For you not to run away with the idea and greedily patent it, I'd just tell you to ride on the bittorrent protocol.

mingpan 13y ago ↗

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.