Peer-to-peer

[gadolf66]

Hi!
As soon as I read about the project, I thought about Yacy (or any other p2p search engine).
Wouldn't this be an alternative to centralization?

[oneiros]

Thank you for bringing this up. Note that I personally do not have any hands-on experience with p2p or otherwise distributed search engines, so I really am no expert. But I am very open to hear from anyone who is interested in this field.

We are currently defining APIs to perform search and discovery tasks. I would fully expect that these could be implemented on top of a distributed index or similar technology.

This could be quite interesting, especially if it means that the individual cost of operating such a provider goes down.

Due to time and budget constraints this is not something that we, Mastodon, are going to pursue in the near future, but if anyone wants to give this a go, I would be happy to help.

And if there is something in the current specs preventing such an implementation I would also love to hear about it to see if and how we can improve this.

Possibly related discussion: #22

[astro]

Related:

• https://git.orlives.de/schmittlauch/Hash2Pub
• https://git.orlives.de/schmittlauch/paper_hashtag_federation/src/branch/master/paper_hashtag_federation.pdf
• https://conf.tube/videos/watch/340eb706-28c0-4a43-9364-700297ca96cb