Some questions:
1. Is this supposed to be run by me (an individual?) or run for my by somebody else (some existing community?).
2. Is there any information on what makes this decentralized? How does it "discover" other users?
1. Is this supposed to be run by me (an individual?) or run for my by somebody else (some existing community?).
2. Is there any information on what makes this decentralized? How does it "discover" other users?
2. Users belong to a certain instance and can be addressed like username@domain. You can follow any user from any instance and you will receive their posts, you can interact with them just like if they'd be on your own instance (replies, mentions, reblogs, favourites, etc). On the technical side, this is accomplished with OStatus, Atom feeds/ActivityStreams, Salmon, PubSubHubbub and Webfinger. Anything that supports those technologies is part of the network (e.g. GNU social instances)
User discovery in the sense of UX is something I want to work on in the future, like implementing "who to follow" suggestions etc.
The README says it is a Gnu Social implementation (previously known as StatusNet). It uses Jabber/XMPP for Message transport, which is decentralised and federated. See also
OpenMicroBlogging, predecessor of OStatus and the original protocol of laconi.ca/StatusNet/GNU Social, was built on XMPP.