There has to be a payoff though. BitTorrent is actually pretty hard to get working correctly, track down the torrent files... people do it because it's the only way to get some content and a way to get content you'd otherwise have to pay for. With social media, there's not much reward and most people's friends already post for free on other networks. Not saying it's not worthwhile, but it's hard to extract this lesson from BitTorrent.

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l72 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

But it can also be specialized forums like https://startrek.website/ which is hosted using Lemmy but you can use your federated login. It can help bring back indie forums and websites that aren’t controlled by Reddit or meta.

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blooalien 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yeah, for sure. Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use (or simpler) than existing social networks, and / or offer some genuinely unique and desirable feature(s) in order to attract any serious critical mass of users.

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cramsession 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Interestingly the original Napster was a pretty good social network! I really liked being able to browse through all of a user's shared files. We should bring something like that back.

	▲	dokyun 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Soulseek has been around a while...

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bit1993 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Anything trying to be a social network in a properly peer-to-peer fashion would have to be as simple to use..."

In practice this issue arise something like this: A decentralized service is launched it is so decentralized the user has to store their own private keys. Later a centralized solution is launched where the user does not have to go through the trouble of storing the private keys, everything is managed for them... everyone joins the centralized service.

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s5300 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]