Distributed Twitter

[andrewducker]

Can anyone see a way that a distributed Twitter could work?

Obviously you could use RSS to aggregate tweeters you like into one place - but that only covers very basic functionality.  For instance, I can't see a way to both decentralise it _and_ allow for hashtag filtering over the whole database to find the tweets you like.

Any thoughts?

Comments

[nameandnature]

It's Usenet: flood fill between servers, hashtags are groups and "all tweets from Fred" is a group, so hashtagged posts from Fred are crossposts to Fred's group and the hashtag group.

This isn't completely distributed as there are still servers and clients.

[andrewducker]

But that's fine, because anyone can run a local server for NNTP.

Not a bad idea. I wonder how high the traffic is.

[nameandnature]

Rather less than the real Usenet, I'd've thought. More thoughts:

You probably don't actually want NNTP and the Usenet message format, you just want to steal their ideas. Bonus points for making it use Google Wave.

You'd want to fix Usenet's current forgery and cancel problem with magical crypto fairy dust.

Anyone can run a leaf node, but you need a bunch of peers which flood to each other. Arranging peering is a manual step in NNTP. It'd be nice if this weren't the case in the distributed system, but sorting that out is a hard problem.

You don't want special clients for it, because people don't care enough to install one. Your local server's job is to present the messages it knows about as web pages, Atom feeds and so on.

[andrewducker]

Preventing forgery is a problem - but one that's solved so long as site owners want to keep spam off of their own site (which they do) and people are willing to pass data along.

The usenet model, where I pass data to Bob (who trusts me), who passes it to Charles (who trusts him), who passes it to Dave (who trusts him) works pretty well, so long as everyone along the chain has a vested interest in their own reputation - and thus the reputation of their members.

I'm also in favour of manual peering - and you'll end up with some central points and lots of branches and leaves off of that.

[nameandnature]

I'm guessing servers won't be run by individuals who trust each other but by service providers like Twitter (or ISPs if such a thing became popular, like email is and news used to be). Providers probably take money from users (or show them ads) but they don't trust them. If I can inject a tweet saying "andrewducker is wearing baggy pants today" at my local server and have it propagate everywhere, you might get a bit annoyed. Hence magical crypto fairy dust.