4 ms·

I see no reason why something like Twitter couldn't be decentralized. All it really is is a huge RSS aggregator. If every Twitter user had something like Opera

I see no reason why something like Twitter couldn't be decentralized. All it really is is a huge RSS aggregator. If every Twitter user had something like Opera or some other web exposed RSS server where they could publish their comments subscribing would be as easy as reading a blog. You would lose a couple of features however... * Size limitations would need to be maintained client side and thus would be inconsistent. * No way to make it so that only your followers can DM you. * It wouldn't be nearly as easy to ensure unique identifiers for each user. In short, I totally agree but I do wonder if this kind of network is fairly far off. Seems like we're trying to decentralize a lot of things right now (cpu processing, social networks, p2p downloading, etc) and so I'm sure problems like this will get tackled very hard in the coming years.

wmf 17y ago
It's already done: http://openmicroblogging.org/ http://openmicroblogging.org/ Twitter is centralized for business reasons, not technical.
tesseract 17y ago
Decentralized Twitter = http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_protocol
- pyre 17y ago
  Not really. Maybe on a basic level. But something like Twitter being centralized is less important to most people. Twitter is rather simple in concept and (at least a basic implementation) could be made as a project for an undergraduate CS course. Something that provided a decentralized Facebook/MySpace network would be more useful/important. As long as it was easy enough to deploy, people wouldn't necessarily need to get their own hosting option for it to work... but on the other hand it could open up a market for hosting that caters to people that just want to run that web-software package.