---
layout: post
title: "Integrating users on decentralized network"
date: 2018-12-05 09:50:00
categories: misc
---

ZeroNet has thousands of sites, but only a very few of them are being actively
used. There are countless half-baked projects of "shiny new engine", blogs on
prolonged hiatus, chats with hundred and one "hello world" message and even more
obscure stuff no one cares about any longer.

<cut/>

But it's also hard to find sites with interesting content or active users. Over
its history, 0net has seen many attempts at site directories, but i've yet to
see a truly working one. I'm not going to fix that (yet), but at least here's an
outline of possible solution so that i (or perhaps someone else) can get back to
it later.

First, here's an observation. What's the most typical first time user's
question? Of course, it's "What are some sites/blogs/people to
look/read/follow?" And guess what, people even get answers to these questions!
Alas, not always complete, but often more up-to-date than more static lists. And
even when not asked, people would share links to sites they like or own. So it's
not that nobody knows information, it's that it's not put into a good format in
one place.

But guess what? Some of this information is already sitting on users'
drives. Users can see list of sites their node seeds. There's even a simple
"favourites" system on 0hello. But you can't share that list.

You also can't easily follow other users' activity (although i've seen people
proposed it long time ago), combination of which would (in theory) let user with
sufficient social circle to discover most of new content they might be
interested in.

Oh, yeah, that sounds just like a social network. But as others have mentioned,
0net indeed has the potential to *be* meta social network rather than *host*
one. But for that, we need to push integration much further than current "news
feed" on 0hello.

That said, there's probably a reason why it doesn't progress fast enough.  More
than one, in fact. Webdev (as most computing activities) is overly complicated;
people get easily distracted to do fancy stuff instead of features; 0net has
also technical "server-side" issues and feature requests; when you make
something, others might not start use it (which encourages making standalone
classical sites instead of improving core).

How do we solve it? I don't know. More human power, dependent types, DSLs,
neural networks, more rants?..

PS: maybe writing a post like this while being half-asleep is not the best idea,
but if i probably wouldn't want to edit it later anyway
