Decentralized Hacker News

I think you're letting your imagination run away. There's a time and place for that, but I think the Hacker News analogy is inappropriate here.

I think you're missing on the big value of Hacker News: It's excellent moderators and community. This can only happen because it is centralized.

Hacker News already has an API. You can write a clone of Hacker News that is API compatible, open source it, and put a big "host on xxx" button on your GitHub repo; but you won't have the community, and you won't have the awesome moderation from Deng.

Even when we look at successful decentralized products like BitTorrent, they tend to build on tiny centralized parts: The Pirate Bay, where the trackers are. The fact that BitTorrent handwaves around some seed nodes...

Getting back to "letting your imagine run away." I think you need to drop the Hacker News analogy and describe what you're trying to build in non-technical terms: Who is it for, what does it do, why does it do it, where do people use it, and why do they use it?

Otherwise, without starting with some kind of use cases, you're just describing typical design patterns and features of a backend that would apply to any social network or blogging platform.

Seems functionally similar to Lemmy: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy

Am I getting "Hey you are a programmer, I have a business idea"-spam not only from friends and family but also while scrolling through hacker-news?

This reads like ChatGPT, unfortunately. 80% of what is described is a stock web app, and the decentralised part is mostly hand-waving with no clear explanation of what the boundaries are between a API and courier server. Any existing ActivityPub implementation already matches whatever is described.

I can’t tell if this is serious or parody; but, I’m upvoting because it’s a perfect genre piece.