One of the most difficult challenges that most decentralized social networks face is that of content and user discovery. Everybody and all of their stuff lives in different places on the network, and finding anything often requires being aware of where that thing lives in the first place. It’s a growing pain that only gets more pronounced as the network gets bigger. That’s why the Mastodon project hopes to tackle this problem head on with Fediverse Discovery Providers.
This initiative, funded by an NGI Search grant, aims to develop infrastructure and a reference implementation for “pluggable services” that people can use with their instances to find stuff. A few interesting use-cases are highlighted on the project repository:
Looking at these examples, it’s clear that the project aims to provide a service infrastructure framework that any Fediverse instance might be able to take advantage of.