Comment by josephwegner | Hacker News Reader

Comment by josephwegner | Hacker News Reader

I appreciate all of these distributed social networks (Mastodon, Peepeth, Diaspora, etc.) getting some buzz right now. I think distributed hosting of social networks is an important step forward.

However, they're all lacking one major thing that needs to happen in order for a true Facebook Exodus to take place - distributed discovery and consumption. Facebook has a HUGE network effect, and simply put there is no way any of my acquaintances are going to leave Facebook just because of the recent news. I can start a Mastodon node, but I would be shouting into a void - there's no one there to see my content, and no incentive for someone to move over. If I _did_ convince anyone to move, they'd be shouting into the same void, and get bored. There needs to be a way for us early adopters to post content, but let it still reach people that haven't jumped yet.

Right now the best solution I have for this is something pull-based like RSS. Even that's not a great solution, though - my average acquaintance no longer uses RSS. I might be able to get my mom to install Feedly, but no way is my old friend from High School going to install it. Open to hear ideas around this.

I understand that concern. There are some compromise solutions already available, at least specifically for Mastodon, and certainly space to communally explore further solutions.

A Mastodon feed has built in ATOM (RSS) support so you could encourage someone to subscribe to you in Feedly if you wished and they were already a happy RSS user.

You can use tools like IFTTT or Zapier to cross-post from Mastodon to Facebook (or Twitter or whatever else).

There's a Mastodon to Twitter bridge [1] where Twitter users can volunteer a primary Mastodon account (on any instance) for people to follow and in turn see all of the people on Twitter they follow that have posted a Mastodon address to follow them on Mastodon. A similar bridge should be easy to set up for Facebook as well, I just don't think it has been done yet.

In a way that bridge is the closest to a public directory of Mastodon users, and there's certainly room for other sorts of public directories (Mastodon "yellow pages"/"Yahoo listings") or Mastodon-tuned search engines. (Of course, existing search engines often already return Mastodon results; Mastodon feeds are already web pages.)

[1] https://bridge.joinmastodon.org/

> I can start a Mastodon node, but I would be shouting into a void - there's no one there to see my content, and no incentive for someone to move over.

That's what POSSE[0] is for: you Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. So you'd publish on Mastodon & (hopefully automatically) also publish a syndicated feed on Facebook.

[0]: https://indieweb.org/POSSE

There is an opportunity here as this has parallels to the early internet. Think of your Mastodon node as your website, how would people discover you? Someone needs to build a scanner/crawler/indexer for the allowed-to-be-discoverable parts of these non-domain+HTTP services. A Google for the decentralized web will be built by someone and there can be a first mover advantage here. Sadly, to do it right requires money and time, so beware the motives of the ones that pop up. Regardless, I don't necessarily think it's the job of these services to provide that centralized index (it's against their core anyways). If anything, they just need to provide crawlable, opt-in hooks for the bots to hit.

For a lot of people, RSS hasn't gone away. They just call it Apple News. It has very quietly scaled to 70M MAUs and lets you add custom news feeds.

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