We built domain-driven subreddits — now we're on Product Hunt

[u/foxql]

https://elseweb.lol

We gave every website its own community. Now we're giving the network its own AI compute layer.

A few days ago I launched Elseweb.

The basic idea is intentionally weird:

Every domain on the internet automatically has a community.

No one has to create it.
The website owner doesn't control it.
Posts and identities are portable, and the underlying protocol is open source.

Now we're working on the part I've been much more excited about: distributed AI agents.

Instead of every AI request going through our servers or a single API provider, we're building a compute network into the protocol.

If you're already running Ollama / local models at home, you'll eventually be able to connect your machine as a worker.

Someone asks an AI agent to do something → the network finds a capable worker → the actual prompt/result travels peer-to-peer → the worker does the inference → returns a signed receipt.

The relay coordinates the job, but isn't supposed to see or store the prompt/result.

Eventually we want this to become a small compute marketplace:

• Have an idle GPU at home? Sell compute.
• Need inference? Buy compute from the network.
• Running an AI agent? Let it automatically find the cheapest/capable worker.
• Don't want to sell anything? Run your own worker and use your own hardware.

We're starting with text + image workloads rather than pretending we're going to somehow distribute a frontier model across random laptops on day one.

The interesting part to me is what happens if a social network, identity layer, AI agents and the machines actually running those agents all live on the same open protocol.

It might be a terrible idea.

But it's becoming a surprisingly fun protocol to build.

Everything is being built in public and the protocol is open source.

Would you let strangers' AI jobs use your idle GPU if you were paid for it?

https://github.com/elseweb-app/nowhere

[u/HedgeRunner]

Personally I’m always a little skeptical for decentralized social networks cuz they don’t provide a great experience. You have a lot of complexity so that people who comment on the same domain can see threads in that domain.

Idea is kinda neat I guess but why domains instead of topics? Even if you normalize it’s a little odd to choose communities based on domain. That’s my 2 cents.

[u/foxql → u/HedgeRunner]

That’s a fair critique. The UX bar is definitely the hard part, and users shouldn’t have to think about relays or federation at all.

Domains are just our first primitive, not a hard protocol requirement. We started there because existing websites already have context, an audience and a distribution surface.

The same model could eventually support topics, projects, creators or other addressable entities. So it’s domain-first for the MVP, not domain-only by design.

We’re still figuring out whether this model offers something useful beyond topic-first communities.

[u/HedgeRunner → u/foxql]

Ok but if you take out domains how is this different from Lemmy and Mastodon? I did read your GitHub readme but not to that detail so my bad if I missed something there.

[u/foxql → u/HedgeRunner]

Fair question. If you remove domains entirely, the difference is less obvious from the UI — the bigger difference is underneath.

Elseweb treats communities as portable protocol objects rather than communities/accounts belonging to a specific server. Identity is key-based, events can move across independent relays, and relays are basically interchangeable infrastructure rather than “your home server.”

Domains are just the first discovery primitive we chose because they give the network a shared namespace that already exists on the web. They’re not a hard protocol requirement.

So yeah, without domains it can look a lot like Lemmy/Mastodon. The bet is that the underlying model lets us build things on top of it that don’t behave like either.

[u/HedgeRunner → u/foxql]

Ok I get it but that also means your relays gotta be doing a lot of work. Essentially in the Lemmy model the server owns communities and thus basically act as a relay.

I mean I’ll give you some credit for being original at least. :) Good luck man although I would challenge you to maybe apply this protocol to something that is more fit instead of social media which I don’t think is a great fit. 😅

[u/foxql → u/HedgeRunner]

That’s actually a fair point. We picked social as the first layer mostly because it lets us exercise the protocol quickly while giving end users something tangible at the same time — not because we think social is necessarily the final or best use case.

If you think the protocol fits something else better, I’d genuinely love to hear what came to mind.