I bet it's doable, people broadcasting posts and shares, and feeds being built on everyone's individual server. I doubt I have the chops for it, but it's very interesting. forwardslash, do you have any thoughts?
Oh man, as you may or may not know I was a backer of Diaspora and I've posted a few thing on Hubski about Tent.io - in short, I think distributed, decentralized systems are the bee knees. Unfortunately I don't even really use the centralized social networks so I don't really have a need for a decentralized one and thus have preferred to spend my time working on things I do use, such as hubski. There are a few cool technologies to broadcast things including pubsubhubbub - which is an awesome name for a protocol - and there are a number of existing distributed networks we could hook into: aggregation via hubski, anyone? Unfortunately a lot of the implementations of these networks are bogged down in existing ideas of things, as such everyone (including me) just asks things like, "So it's just a distributed twitter?" because microblogging is an easy first thing to do. What if you hosted your own blog and had a hub running on the same server. As you posted new content on your blog you would send out pings to those subscribed to whatever you tagged it as, those subscribed to you, or those subscribed to your domain. People could subscribe via a centralized service such as hubski, or their own server, or even via any service which implemented the pubsubhubbub protocol. All in all I have very lofty ideas about what can be accomplished with this.
IMO the key to success here is any given user not having to know that they are not using a decentralized service.Unfortunately a lot of the implementations of these networks are bogged down in existing ideas of things, as such everyone (including me) just asks things like, "So it's just a distributed twitter?" because microblogging is an easy first thing to do.