What's a good alternative to "centralized social networks"? Atom feed clients?
Diaspora: https://diasporafoundation.org/ pump.io: http://pump.io/ GNUSocial: http://gnu.io/social/ Friendica: http://friendica.com/
Of course, you're bound to find a much geekier crowd here than twitter, G+, etc... but, that shouldn't matter too much to HN readers. ;)
Regrettably, setting up a website is still too hard for most people - but it's never been easier, too. If you're reading Hacker News, you should be able to do it.
Read the IndieWebCamp website for more: https://indiewebcamp.com/
Meanwhile i'm still surprised the 'independent web' is a thing. Like people 'rediscovering' static html sites. Makes me feel old.
IMHO, the ideas of the IndieWebCamp people will last far longer than those of the other so-called "decentralized" social networking projects. I'm confident that (1) my kid(s) will have a HTML website, and (2) they'll never have heard of Diaspora or Pump.io. I hope that, by that time, Twitter and Facebook will only be used by Granny and Granddad, if at all.
I wrote my own thin API[0] for livejournal and a page scraper[1] to manage crossposting to livejournal and profiling links (like facebook) without wordpress or third party services, so I definitely get the 'IndieWeb' ethos. I like the idea of having your own site and broadcasting to social media rather than the other way around. Writing your own code and being able to do things yourself is very liberating. It just seems weird to me to think of owning your own content on the web as a progressive, pseudo-revolutionary movement because it seems like only yesterday that's just the way things were.
[0](https://github.com/kennethrapp/journalist)
[1](https://github.com/kennethrapp/embedbug) -- beware if you play around with this one because it's messy and the documentation is practically nonexistent. Because i'm lazy.