Responding to the proposal (which is unjustly flagged to death, even if I agree that it isn’t a good idea): > I came up with a solution that eliminates central

Responding to the proposal (which is unjustly flagged to death, even if I agree that it isn’t a good idea): > I came up with a solution that eliminates centralized control, trolls, advertising, and really all forms of harassment, and it doesn't even require a special server. If it behaved as you describe (only followers see top-level updates and only followers of every person i the chain see replies; which I don’t think the concrete features you describe actually support, but I’ll get to that next), then it also eliminates the thing that makes social media work for both audiences and the people looking for audiences—there is zero discoverability, you can’t even encounter people through conversations. Of course, with public outgoing feeds where visibility limits are a decision of the viewer’s client (to which all the visibility-deciding work of a server is outsourced, to avoid having a dedicated social server and just rely on regular web pages), it can’t be guaranteed to work that way. It can work that way for a viewer who wants to see that restrictive of a view, but that doesn’t prevent other people from having a more expansive view. You can choose what you see, but not who can see your stuff or who can engage with it (if you have a client that behaves in the described restrictive manner, you won’t see engagement from people you don’t follow, but they can engage and others with a permissive client can see that engagement.)