Hacker News Reader

I was hoping to build something.

Every publisher/user runs their own node, or from a node-service provider. And then you "friend" and follow built around RSS with signed or crypted items in the feed. Other nodes operate as aggregators and discovery services.

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Signing posts, comments and likes is essential for federation. That way fake messages can be prevented. And it allows users to do their own calculation of what to show in a feed. E.g. only likes by whitelisted people could be considered.

It's technically not possible to avoid leaking private messages, but metadata like license and level of confidentiality in the posts should at least provide hooks for legal enforcement.

Kind of sounds like blogs and RSS as it already is.

Now you know why Google wanted to kill off Reader.

It is. The "trick" is to make that whole process as simple/easy as an FB/Twitter.

Except blogs as a social space are pretty well moribund. Comments are overrun by spam, and additional social features like pingbacks are practically unknown.

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