Finding people, companies and references is most crucial for a professional social network.
Here is how we plan to tackle this for Flockingbird: Decentralised and Privacy-friendly:
https://fediverse.blog/~/Flockingbird/finding-people-with-flockingbird
@flockingbird Doubt this would support the way I used LinkedIn: make connections and look them up when following up. Very common.m
I often land in new groups/contexts with no connections yet and this approach would make finding the first connection very very hard.
Connecting should be super lightweight, discovery easy. A public (slow?) search spanning many many instances might help? Perhaps allow many 'local' contexts (eg: a conference, organisation or topic) rather than one?
@madnificent As for connecting, that is a good subject for another post. I'm sorry if the blogpost implies that searching is the only way to connect.
I'm not sure if I understand your comment about it "making finding thefirst connection [..] hard". Do you mean that without groups, discovery is hard?
Geographic, or local discovery is a neat idea, It's on the list now. We need to think this through very well, though, because it also is a potential privacy nightmare.
@flockingbird It's easy talking from my lazy chair, but the search problem is hard.
The first connection in a new group would be very hard to find. You most often find people by name, not because they shared their URL (especially so when the network is still smaller).
Regarding privacy: it could make sense to *choose* to make some info publicly available perhaps?
Regarding "local": I'd want to be on multiple federated instances in an integrated way. I cater to multiple groups. 🤔
@madnificent Those are some really good questions. Let me answer them one-reply a time:
The search-problem is hard. But proof of concept shows that pushing updates from contacts (following) into an index is easy. Pushing the updates from their followings is possible. We'll need to just try, and see if this causes flooding, overflowing or if it works. We expect it to work.
