Ask HN: Recommended reading for decentralizing a social network?
The question is too broad ... you need to be more detailed about what you are trying to achieve. Something like Facebook? Something like TikTok? Something like Twitter?
Video sharing? Audio? GIFs?
Replies? Discussions? Groups? DMs and PMs?
Who is your audience? People who can install Docker? Or people who don't know the difference between a browser and an "app"?
Look up and read about XMPP, Matrix, and ActivityPub. Here's a document:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/
That talks a little about the protocols and the software and might serve as a reasonable starting point.
Specifically: something like HN so replies and ranking I guess.
Audience: a Docker audience suffices.
Just so you know ... that would exclude me. That's OK, of course, a more niche audience can lead to better and richer conversations, and there will always be people on the fringes.
Maybe you want a Mastodon instance that specialises in your sort of thing, and allow federation to catch the people who have interesting things to say, but are on a different instance.
It would certainly exclude people initially but there are self-hosting "operating systems" emerging that enable users running a raspi to download and run pre-configured Docker containers as easily as an App Store app (e.g. https://getumbrel.com).
A federated Mastodon-like instance might be the move, but I have a way of providing Sybil resistance so could probably have an open p2p relay network. This is why I was asking for reading. I want to make sure I understand all the options.
For more context, I want to decentralize https://stacker.news which is basically an HN clone with Sybil resistance (costs bitcoin to post/broadcast) and karma is withdraw-able as bitcoin. The community is very fond of decentralization for obvious reasons plus I think it'd be a fun challenge.
The Interplanetary File System is a good start for decentralizing websites. https://docs.ipfs.io/
I'm waiting to hear from the rest of HN, I've been curious about decentralized websites for a while.