Just give me P2P social media and put me in the swarm. BitTorrent for Reddit and Twitter.

It shouldn't matter what servers are anywhere. It should all be eventually consistent for some agglomerated cluster sampling of the world. Make the content immutable and ephemeral. People that care to archive it will.

Federation is silly and is part of the problem. Plus it creates more little fiefdoms.

I'll subscribe to my own filters if I care, and my agent will handle the rest.

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alisonatwork 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I don't think this approach will work for most people. Assuming the Bluesky firehose is 50GB/day, that's a massive amount of data to have to download just to filter for the handful of events a person might actually be interested in. My phone barely goes through a couple GB per month!

But perhaps for efficiency I should rent a server to do the filtering on the cloud and then sync it down to my phone? Well then why not instead consume from a server which already did most of the filtering that I wanted? And now we get back to something like usenet, or the modern day fediverse.

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tough 3 days ago | parent [-]

how i would make it work is you'd only download actual bits you care about, the rest can be handled by indexers you pay for to help you sort it out

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alisonatwork 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I guess this is when it gets fuzzy. A true peer-to-peer social network would mean that every node has to be able to get everything and also be able to share whatever it has with every other node. If every participant on this kind of social network was required to maintain their own "seedbox", then it implicitly limits access to only people with means.

But if there were hubs funded by groups of interested people that allowed those folks to share the cost of "seeding" and in return only "leech" the information they care about... then isn't that essentially the same kind of decentralization that already exists on the fediverse? The way I understand it, instances are set up by communities of people with similar interests and those instances are configured to only propagate a subset of the events that their community is interested in.

	▲	tough 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		how i solved for this was reciprocal pinning so any node owns all their data (personal log) + whoever they follow (mutual follow reprocity) last x content (indices so its easy to get last n, or last since xyz) and so anyone can decide exactly what they keep or not on their node and thus share by simply following or not (maybe two level, so you can choose to not pin people you follow) heh, smt like that anyways the idea is very much to do like bittorrent or kademilia but for social media posts i need to research more the fediverse before building anything tho

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johnecheck 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

That's more or less what atproto is, except the indexer is called a relay and provides the data directly. Currently bluesky is providing their relay for free, but I don't believe there's any reason they couldn't make it paid in the future.

	▲	tough 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		yeah they had an outage in 2024 i think or was that registrations only?

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

You're describing ZeroNet.

It has ZeroTalk as a Reddit-like thing, ZeroMe as a social network and ZeroBlog as a Twitter-like thing.

https://zeronet.io

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroTalk

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroMe

https://github.com/HelloZeroNet/ZeroBlog

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

I've spent a bunch of time in this space, and there are some really interesting options (SSB, matrix, etc).

They all have awkward tradeoffs which lead most people to use one of the centralized networks.

In the end, I return to whatever system has the people I want to interact with; I get very little out of social media unless they are present.

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

Boy, those of us that remember Usenet are probably getting deja vu…

	▲	ethbr1 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Eternal amnesia.

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

Well you can run your own ActivityPub Server/Client and subscribe (and thus federate) with anyone who hasn’t explicitly blocked you from federating with them. Bridge that with AT and you can see and interact with whatever you want on the Fediverse.

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tough 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I actually tried to vibe-code this, not finished tho