I imagined gp (mikece) as a HN techie (not an oblivious end-user) and thought he was wondering about how to use programming technology to avoid central servers ... and therefore, me interpreting "search/discovery in a distributed way" in a very literal manner was the appropriate level of abstraction to mikece. Avoiding central servers (if possible) is an interesting goal to discuss because they have a tendency to attract disproportionate users which defeats the goals of decentralization.
>Indexing videos once a day (or once an hour or whatever) would be very feasible.
And here, you're interpreting what's feasible only at the level of the technical stack instead of considering several chess moves ahead to emergent group behaviors which renders the metadata-only type of index a solution as not end-user friendly.
>, and some might be better at sorting for relevance than others.
And that's the server that would end up becoming a defacto "centralized" server that people were trying to avoid. This is especially true if that superior server also includes the video data.
Consider that the http protocol itself is already decentralized. If that's true why do people perceive Youtube and Facebook as centralized when they're only nodes on a http network? Because decentralized protocols don't stop emergent group behavior towards centralization.
