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Comment by hk__2 | Hacker News Reader

> How do I find people to follow?

> First, you must know them and get their public key somehow

And here lies the main problem of most of these decentralized alternatives: how do you discover new content? One of the biggest innovation of Twitter was to be able to follow a hashtag-- say #SomeEvent2022 and you see all tweets using that hashtag, not only those of people you follow. This tends to be abused by spamers, but it’s a great way to follow what’s going on at large events or find stuff related to some topic.

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You can implement search on top of crypto hashes. This is how decentralized P2P file networks like Kad worked.

The discovery doesn't need to be at protocol level. You can have some servers following large number of accounts, analyze the feed, create a "trending" list and publish that under their own account that you follow. Then you can have second level "trending" servers which aggregate over first level ones if you want even more "trendiness"

It makes sense to me to take content discovery out of the protocol. This allows different apps on the same network to create different mechanisms for discovery.

Some may want a pure chronological view of posts from people the follow with no algorithm, some may want pure algos a la TikTok.

It seems like the nostr protocol allows for all of this. Users can decide their experience by downloading different client apps.

If you take content discovery out of the protocol, I would say it then behooves you to put at least an example of content discovery into the reference implementation.

There's a big difference between creating a protocol that's intended for fully-content-agnostic communication over the Internet (eg, HTTP) and creating a protocol that's specifically intended to be used to build a social network. The latter type needs various features that enable the type of behavior we know people on social networks desire from them. It does not, as you say, necessarily need to encode strong opinions about how content discovery should be done into the protocol at a fundamental level, but it at least needs to acknowledge that that is a thing that will be necessary for any social network to succeed.

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon, it's been added ~3 weeks ago:

https://nerdschalk.com/how-to-follow-a-hashtag-on-mastodon/

You can follow hashtags on Mastodon. There are many discovery options but they are all pull rather than pushed into your feed. They are under development. Feditrends.com fedi.directory trunk...

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