What is RetroShare? It's a communications and file sharing software (and protocol) similar to DC++, Bittorrent with peering based on public key cryptography. On top of the network and security stack, services such as IRC and MSN-like messaging is available. A message board for sharing posts and subscribing to "channels" used a rating system by votes (IIRC).

Today I'd describe it as similar to Keybase or Matrix, but peer to peer, instead of federated or centralised. It was much a developer-and cypherpunk-community.

Several years ago I spent a lot of time in the network because the social aspects were interesting. Reputation management went deep. Not accepting someone's public key (blocking) would render their data useless so you don't had to engage with it.

This got longer than I expected, but I felt nostalgic.

Edit: Thoroughly evaluate any software if security is important. RS isn't audited, and should be regarded as experimental.

[1]: https://retroshare.cc/

The key to HN is the social network aspect or effect, i.e. the people who come here. How you get people to this hypothetical alternative is the hard question. Why would I want to leave HN?

If I choose not to host a node and choose to use another provider.. am I not putting the same trust in that node as I do with Facebook? The host is responsible data leaks, poor security, ads, bad ethics, etc.

In theory with perfect hosts, this works. In reality, some hosts will be bad.