Comment by megous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by megous | Hacker News Reader

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Some decentralized discovery method for interesting tech content would be nice. Something simple, like if you could put a list of websites you like to:

    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/recommended.list
    -------
    https://friend1.domain/ Blogs about electronics
    https://friend2.domain/ Blogs about knitting
    -------

    https://friend1.domain/.well-known/distributed/recommended.list
    -------
    https://my.domain/ Blogs about hacking SBCs
    https://friend3.domain/ Nice website
    -------

And you could write a bot that would walk through this, avoid loops, and construct a graph, and give you a search or RSS. RSS feeds could be also discoverable.

    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/my-feeds.txt
    --------
    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/feed-blog.xml My blog posts
    https://my.domain/.well-known/distributed/feed-announce.xml My announcements
    --------

Just something that helps with discovery of interesting content in a decentralized way, outside of search engines, aggregators, HTML pages, etc. You would be able to select search distnace from certain domains, blacklist domains, etc.

And if you assume person == domain, this would build an open, distributed, searchable social graph (of people with domains :) and something to say). You'd be able to see weights of domains by how many people recommend them, etc.

There would be no central storage for the graph.

That is something I have been thinking about too. I imagine this could work as a distributed decentralized db where you publish some link and sign it with your domain key. A client could easily select the most submitted urls from DB and also 'follow' certain domains(users) that submit the most interesting urls. I would love to discuss and validate this idea more.

Yeah, one problem is that on the current internet, if people are not constantly posting low value crap on social media, they are hard to discover, and they're ranked down just for inactivity. But this system would support ranking just on the number of domain recommendations, and people would be able to make tools to do their own ranking (eg. how many people I recommend recommend domain X would be my rank for domain X,...), etc.

But I think, it would need to be decentralized, to avoid single DB somewhere that could be abused and manipulated, or lost.

But if you have to use a tool to read the graph from the web yourself, and people have to upload recommendations to their own server, and have them directly associated with their domain, that may encourage saner behavior, too.

If someone wants to make a centralized public search for this graph, so that people who don't see value in building their own index/ranking could search for content too, that would be possible.

But the key aspect would need to be the distributed nature. It would not need any cryptography either, just a bunch of text files at the simplest level.

The graph would be out there on web servers, the creativity would be in creating the tools to scrape it, rank stuff, and searching through it. And that could even be done in some incremental way (without the need to scrape it all at once).

Totally agree. Ping me on connect@tautvilas.lt if you would like to discuss this idea more and try to develop it :)

This is a really cool idea. I might spend some time hacking on something like this after dweb camp. If you're on Scuttlebutt I can CC you on my progress.

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