while something like a firehose would do what I'm wanting, it's far more centralized and less federated than I would like for this sort of thing. so I was thinking that some sort of peer to peer discovery protocol or mechanism would be able to accomplish what I'm thinking. I was stuck on how nodes/hosts would find each other without some sort of centralized list, but i figured perhaps something like how i imagine discovery to work on decentralized ptp sharing networks. if each host had a list of what nodes it knew about and where the public posts go for said node (either itself or a firehouse node), my host or even client could propagate to me posts out there for public consumption on any federated host/network by bouncing around to all the known nodes a host knows about when it lands there. and a given node could decide to not respond to requests from outside or non-whitelisted nodes if the admin doesn't want to join the public network. this would also help solve the problem of finding people on different nodes or even networks as the search could go through the network and ask each host to search for whatever.