Matadisco – Decentralized Data Discovery

Matadisco – Decentralized Data Discovery(matadisco.org)

64 points by biggestfan 54 days ago | 10 comments

mentalgear 51 days ago |

Decentralised Web Indexes are an important avenue if we truly want to ever break free from the private indexes used and dominated by Google and chatbots that in-transparently return results based on their opaque preferences.

stingraycharles 51 days ago | |

Those indexes cost an incredible amount of money to build, maintain and keep improving. It’s worth it for these orgs as these are considered a competitive edge and the “secret sauce” of these orgs.

I find it hard to believe the same amount of investment will be made into a decentralized web index, precisely for the reason that it cannot be monetized.

somat 51 days ago | | |

No they don't. Sure, if you are trying to capture the entire web with hourly latency for billions of users, that takes significant resources. But if your goal is to catalog the subsection of the web you are interested in with weekly latency for yourself and share that catalog with like minded individuals. any body can do that. Don't make gods out of basic web indexing.

mentalgear 50 days ago | | |

Doesn't have to be expensive: You can have decentralised cohorts of same interests groups that provide common indexes, with each client verifying the index of every n item they use, reporting bad indexes/cohort users to avoid abuse.

Also there are state-funded open search indexes, like the European Search Index.

So it can be done realisticly, even though the massive private search index lobby push as hard as they can to deny it.

johnebgd 51 days ago | | |

This. Unless in 2026, we suddenly see Costco sell personal quantum computers for sub $2k, with practically unlimited high speed crystal storage, all cooled/powered by unobtainium fusion reactors that are made with 3D printers at your neighborhood coop, then we either must accept private entities that do this kind of indexing at scale or we should ask government to offer it on taxpayer expense.

dietr1ch 51 days ago | | |

The keep improving part hasn't done so well in 10 years already? Maybe this year the new force-fed AI answers got a bit useful, but many times the risk of hallucination means you still have to go and read a more credible source.

gessha 51 days ago | | |

Are you familiar with any systems that use collaborative filtering to distribute the work and the benefits among users?

tomnicholas1 51 days ago |

Awesome to see this project here - it was partly inspired by my blog post (original is linked from the OP, but there's a slightly newer version on my personal site here[0]).

[0]: https://tom-nicholas.com/blog/2025/science-needs-a-social-ne...

thenthenthen 51 days ago |

The demo shows a bunch of Sentinel image tiles for me.