I've toyed with the idea of an open source P2P social network for a while now. You're idea isn't horrible, it's essential. We can keep trying to support start

I've toyed with the idea of an open source P2P social network for a while now. You're idea isn't horrible, it's essential. We can keep trying to support start-ups which will compete with Facebook, but they will all either get bought out, or succumb to the same profit motives which make Facebook corrupted by advertising and unchecked government surveillance. The only way a social network can grow to the size where it can displace Facebook without getting shut down for political reasons is by providing real privacy over a distributed open source infrastructure. While it may be abysmal from a PR standpoint, It needs to be the kind of thing where you can post a video of yourself running down mailboxes while DUI, share copyrighted files, or even illegal activity such as black market distribution of drugs, weapons, and CP. That doesn't mean everyone on it needs to be a criminal, but it needs to be that level of bulletproof in order to gain widespread adoption. With the right selection of cryptographic protocols and algorithms, it should be possible to build a distributed system where each user hosts and advertise dozens or hundreds of profiles without being able to access them. The only way to access the data is by request. The only major issue I see is an immense data and computational overhead if your profile must be encrypted with dozens of public keys. From a usability standpoint, accessing it should be no different than installing an IM client. Edit: Essentially, the killer feature is being able to ask your circle of friends is anyone's got some extra weed they can sell you, and actually getting responses because there's no surveillance chilling effect.