I would have more to say about a lot of these things, but I have no time today but also don't want to leave the thread stale too long, so just a few points. >

I would have more to say about a lot of these things, but I have no time today but also don't want to leave the thread stale too long, so just a few points. > This is heartbreaking and I'd love to talk... Permission to reach out via email? Absolutely. I think this might be visible through my GH profile followed-from my HN profile? Unsure. > When you invert control/ownership, the user controls their data. The application is delegated access to it. This is a peer-to-peer data structure. I feel like this is probably an orthogonal question to where the data/system physically lives. It's possible to give logistical / social control over one's data without going to a fully distributed p2p transport/data model. > Then we use a capability system to delegate rights This is good. Also a path I'm pursuing. > Intimacy, to me, means letting users decide how they want to model their social interactions. > Moderation, to me, means deciding what the user gets to see. I have thoughts on this but can't get into it in depth right now. Suffice it to say I am getting a bit of an impression that you are trying -- like an engineer would -- to solve social problems with technical ones. There is no magic bullet for these issues that becomes solved through a P2P (or federative, etc.) model. And my chief concern is actually with the content model / style itself that "social networks" and actually the web itself promulgated. It is asynchronous, "post" oriented, like a mailbox. It is not interactive or real time (apart from messaging), and it is consumptive rather than creative/interactive. I feel like from your comments you are leaving that unchallenged. Or hoping that by giving people control that this will just change. I don't think it will, I think people need to be given better environments and tools. > You solve intimacy and moderation by allowing communities to form and moderate themselves. Agree on this, but I also don't think the solution here is technical. P2P (or federation or whatever) may assist, but in the end these are social problems, and problems of scale. What I perceive as the more resilient social model is a kind of village focus. So what I'm concerned with is two things: 1) how to give people the tools for social/community content construction. So to go beyond the style of magazine-page/leaflet/post/article/shared-link model that the web encouraged and to something that's more about building shared environments. 2) how to let people do that in a more "village" fashion, where, yes, they can moderate themselves; because I believe actually the wide-open mass scale of things like Twitter and/or Facebook etc actually do not really scale. In any case, interesting discussion.