Unless there's a clever scheme I don't know of, encryption that prevents pod operators from reading content would increase the cost by making the system signifi

Unless there's a clever scheme I don't know of, encryption that prevents pod operators from reading content would increase the cost by making the system significantly more complicated. If the data you post to your network is encrypted, then that means anyone who wants to see it needs to have a key to decrypt it. Which might not be terrible as long as posting stuff to the network is all-or-nothing. But if the network needs to have support for allowing different acquaintances access to different content depending on your personal desires then it would become morass. You'd need to encrypt everything differently for each of the different combinations of people or groups of people that you might want to share with, and every time you friend someone, unfriend someone, or rearrange your sharing settings for a person, you'd potentially have to generate and distribute new keys. As far as self-hosting pods, that's fine as long as you want to limit your social network to people who are in a position to host their own pods. But that's got to be a fraction of a percent of all Internet users.