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

[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.