To better explain the problem I am thinking about I like to go back in time.
Freshmeat
At the start of my open source journey there was a website called Freshmeat, which was used by developers to announce new releases, you could also browse and find existing projects. This was before GitHub existed and at that time I really liked this site as a central place to get information. Over time the demand decreased and the site closed, there is currently still a replacement active called freshcode.club but it has no longer the traction of the original service.
Awesome lists
I think the modern successor of Freshmeat are so-called "Awesome lists" on GitHub, basically these are simply repositories with markdown files containing links to interesting tools. The reason why these lists overtook software directories like Freshmeat is probably socially, because now every user could add suggestions by opening a pull request. This is really great and has helped to create "awesome" lists but over time this has still some problems:
- Since every repository has a central owner which needs to accept and merge pull requests there are many lists where the original author is no longer active so that nobody can modify an existing list. You could of course fork such a list but then you have many duplicated lists and nobody knows the currently active maintained list.
- Most lists contain also out-dated content since it is really difficult to keep those lists up-to-date.
Infrastructure software
Software directories like Freshmeat and also Awesome lists have both the problem that they have a central authority which needs to curate each entry. I am currently thinking about a solution for this problem so that we can build software without a central authority. This could allow us to create lists which are always up-to-date and evolve over a long period of time. Because of this I like to call this "infrastructure software" basically a piece of software which can run on a server without moderation or central authority.
You may think, this sounds cool but how could this be possible and how can you prevent spam?
I think we should come back to the basic building blocks of the internet. To protect against spam we need a resource which is limited, for the internet the perfect limitation is a domain. You can only add an entry to our list if you have a custom domain, this automatically limits participation only to users with a custom domain. To verify the ownership of the domain we could add a verification through a DNS TXT record.
As second step if a domain was registered to our list we reverse the data flow, instead of adding an entry directly to a central
database the domain needs to provide an endpoint where the information gets returned. For example, we could request on
every domain the following path /.well-known/software.json and check the response, on success this
endpoint returns all information of our entry on the list.
Through this the owner of the domain can easily update the information of the entry by simply updating the software.json
resource on the server. Our list aggregation service can then check all domains periodically for updates. We could also delete or hide
an entry in case the resource returns an invalid status code like 404 or 500.
Conclusion
I think this idea is really great and could help to build software directories which could be always up-to-date and run for a really long time. Every user on the internet can add a new entry by submitting a custom domain to the list. There are still some challenges since we need a great JSON format to describe a software entry and there needs to be a great aggregation service which provides an intuitive UI, but those technical challenges are easy solvable.
Currently this is still an early idea and there is no implementation, so please contact me if you like the idea and would participate on such a directory. I am really motivated to move this forward to make the web more decentralized and better.