diaspora user directory to discover users more easily

Is this how Friendica does it?

But yes, I'd love to see something like this in place :)

Doesn't this lead to centralization? Or if even the directories are decentralized, then wouldn't we need a directory of directories and so on?

@akshay it will be just like known pods list. We can filter directories from pods list. Only public part of diaspora profiles of people who opt in will be centralized. People who don't want this are excluded by default.

I would like it! That's too bad to not be able to find people when you don't know their exact ID. Such a feature would also encourage the decentralization process since people who join tiny pods would remain findable by their friends.

Can you explain how this discussion is not a duplicate of
https://www.loomio.org/d/LJaVegpr/user-directories-in-diaspora or https://www.loomio.org/d/FBjn89X2/central-hub or this proposal?

I'd love user directories. But to be honest, someone just needs to do one and then make a pull request with the config additions and that is it. No point in discussing anything that involves opt-in central components as people tend to jump over the wall shouting "decentralize all the things" but then love what you did afterwards anyway shrugs

It seems that a lot of user are making the confusion between their identifier [email protected] and their username yyy.
And now it is impossible to find an user knowing his username and pod.
It should be good to be able to find user by username.

For those that are interested on focusing on this more as a proposal, I am currently putting together something on the Diaspora wiki here: https://wiki.diasporafoundation.org/Proposal:User_Directories_in_Diaspora

I'm not a huge fan of adding directory services to the core code. I'd rather have it as a separate app and integrate them with the core code. The hubs themselves should of course be decentralized.

The core diaspora* code is way too heavy as it is and shouldn't cater for every use case. IMHO, the decentralized web needs smaller apps that talk to each other, not do-it-all apps :)

@jasonrobinson

I’m not a huge fan of adding directory services to the core code. I’d rather have it as a separate app and integrate them with the core code

I disagree; I think the only way to do this effectively would be make sure that directories are built into pods. I'm not sure that breaking things out into small apps is necessarily what needs to happen for this kind of infrastructure to work, unless pods themselves could offer some kind of API integration for sending and fetching public profiles that opted in to being shown in a directory.

My recommendation would actually be to get rid of Community Spotlight and replace it with a proper user directory. You could still have a way to feature specific users, filter by profile tags, and filter which results are local and which are global. You could even pull user search results from it.

A feature like this could make user discovery a million times easier across the network, and the added benefit is that directories could be made to be compatible with Friendica as well as RedMatrix.