[derelicta]

What id like to see is a federated MySpace-like service. Users could host their blog on an instance of their choice, toy around its styling or its content directly as to learn about web techs (or keep it simple and remain with the default stylesheet!), and yet remain discoverable thanks to the federated nature of such service. If I had the time its honestly something id love working on.

[Grumbledour]

But discoverability seems the Achilles heel of federated services.

How would you solve that? How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?

I am asking not to poke holes, but because this is an interesting topic. Finding content seems the biggest problem to me in a more decentralized web and we need more good solutions and ideas here.

[dragontamer]

> How would you solve that?

Does it need to be solved? If we're talking about the magic and wonder of the early internet, then I raise you my 800-count Geocities counter and my Neopets storefront with probably got less views than that.

The early web was much, much, much smaller. There weren't slashdot effects that made you go viral. You just did things because you felt cool, and getting like 800 views lifetime or 1200 views was exciting.

Oh right. No one here is actually talking about early internet are they... because they want modern internet attention with a million tweets and half-a-million views by going viral.

> How would I discover a blog in practice and how would this work from a technical standpoint?

Things weren't discoverable back then. You surfed on hours on web-rings looking for like-minded folk. When you found them, they weren't active any more (not by modern day active anyway), but seeing their pages encouraged you to dig deeper.

-------------------

That's IMO, the wonder of the early internet that has been lost today. People didn't seek attention back then, because the internet was still niche.

But now that the internet has proven itself to be one of the best ways to project and capture attention, its become a better reflection of society. I don't think we're going back.

Wikipedia doesn't really have attention-seekers. Just moderators diligently doing their job. Community driven sites off of the advertising networks are likely closer to replicating the feel of early internet, by self-selecting away from attention seekers.

[sigilis]

You're commenting on a discovery engine right now. HN surfaces stuff you never searched for but find interesting all the time. Still, you can't expect for there to be the kind of traffic we see on the big sites today for all the little blogs and whatnot, but that means there would be different motivations behind these more personal spaces. It wouldn't be about driving more clicks, but about expressing oneself to, sharing with, or informing people. Not sure what the economic model for sharing your passion is, but maybe it doesn't always need one.

The constant drive to draw up all of human attention so that those people can be sold something or the other is probably still going to win out in terms of volume, but maybe there can be some more nice things in the world.

[Zak]

There's been some recent progress on that front.

Lemmy's surge in popularity over the summer is a big help. People share a lot of links to smaller websites and Fediverse accounts to Lemmy communities. If you're sharing things on a more blog-like system that uses ActivityPub, you can tag an appropriate Lemmy community in your post for increased exposure.

Mastodon has reversed its stance on full-text search, making it generally available in recent releases (though I think it still requires ElasticSearch, which smaller servers and self-hosters may not want to fuss with).

[kreeben]

Someone, say Google, will index them thus make them discoverable?

[derelicta]

I don't know either tbh. Discoverability in federated services is indeed their Achilles heel and I don't know nearly enough to suggest a solution to that.

[toyg]

We had that, when feeds and pingbacks were a thing. But the masses don't want to self-host, nor do they want to learn about web stuff. Hence Facebook.

[derelicta]

Well you can selfhost if you feel like it in such situation, otherwise you can rely on the good will of good folks to do the tough job for you :)

[dschep]

You can kinda get that from microblog.pub. It federates via ActivityPub and is a single-user customizable micro&macro blog. https://docs.microblog.pub/user_guide.html#customization

[derelicta]

yeah but apparently its single-user only

[pjc50]

Discovery is the adversarial point which breaks so many idealistic systems. The ability to get discovered is worth real money, from outside the system. So as soon as there's a discovery mechanism with a substantial real audience, effort will be devoted to "hacking" it.

[shadowgovt]

Isn't that just "web pages crawled by a search engine?"

I think the technology you're looking for is the World Wide web.

[s3krit]

Sadly not federated, but Spacehey[1] exists! And it's actually quite popular among certain groups of people (the people that were there in the early-mid 00s that want to relive that world, and the younger group that want to live it for the first time). It's pretty cool.

[1] https://spacehey.com/home