>federate Hacker News Mailing lists can be somewhat like that. I would think that most any pub-sub system with a minimalist protocol that supports text and may

>federate Hacker News Mailing lists can be somewhat like that. I would think that most any pub-sub system with a minimalist protocol that supports text and maybe some file types would be adequate to build on. However, I think marketing and social factors have more to do with success and failure of these platforms than anything else. There are certainly a lot of capable programmers who have tried or who are trying to make a social media platform without pervasive user surveillance.