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Comment by danbolt | Hacker News Reader

I'm speaking as a bit of an armchair developer here, but I'd be very interested in seeing a more decentralized alternative to Reddit. A user of one Reddit-like site could post on another's through some sort of protocol, perhaps much like email.

It would certainly be more complicated than something centralized, but considering Reddit's attitude towards user-generated communities and moderation, I could see it being a good fit. There could be a lot of opportunities for black/whitelisting, paid/ad-supported servers, etc.

I'd be very keen to hear more discussion on the topic!

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It could be some kind of a network, perhaps, a network of users.

We could call it, "Usenet."

All jokes aside, what you're describing has existed for over 30 years.

> We could call it, "Usenet."

You beat me to it by less than one minute. Dang!

That's a good point! I guess much of the infrastructure and ideas are already in place. I know little about Usenet apart from some simple research, so perhaps I should take the time to learn more.

Regardless, perhaps Usenet is lacking certain bits of accessibility and convenience that Reddit has? Or, part of me feels that Reddit has a large draw because it's not very difficult to create an account and start engaging. Features such as up/downvoting, badges, and the whole default web interface would make a lot of sense too.

Usenet is missing the upvote/downvote part. If it had that and a spam filter it would be mucho nicer than reddit in my opinion (which is skewed, I was on Usenet when there was no internet and I was quite fond of it before it got filled with spam).

The problem you run into with a decentralized site is you have to mirror massive amounts of data. I think this is what killed usenet. Also spam is hard to fight.

I wonder if a federated Reddit would work. Different subreddits could be hosted on different servers but the accounts could all be connected.

I believe decentralized Reddit can work quite well in this setup:

* Reddit-like engine that supports only one subreddit

* data importing tool that can fetch all the previous posts from Reddit sub and feed them to the engine

* mods of subreddits setup the engine on their own servers and migrate their subs' data there

* another useful addition - profile importing tool that can verify user, so you can preserve your username (via PM from bot on Reddit)

This way we're getting hundreds of small Reddit-like sites. If one fails for some reason - you can always fork it and try to attract audience to your version.

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