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.)

> there is zero discoverability, you can’t even encounter people through conversations.

based on the spam and harassment on most social sites, I'd call this a feature.

If you read something interesting you can email the person with your thoughts , and if they find it interesting they'll follow you. If you are a troll, they'll delete your message and they don't need to use their platform to support your comments. If everyone used this system, trolls wouldn't have a platform anymore.

Here is a great example of discoverability without comments : https://herman.bearblog.dev/misc-updates/

Herman from bear blog posted about a topic, a bunch of people emailed him their thoughts, and he created a follow up post with the best of those thoughts listed out.

This system definitely won't work for people that have FOMO, or need validation through votes on their comments.

> How do you facilitate discovery? IE, what if I want to know about replies people have made without subscribing to their /social page?

That's what makes this system so great, you don't see what other people you don't even know say, and you should be ok with that. Don't look for validation from the trolls on the internet. Reading what random people you don't know say is how you get spam and harassment.

> How can I add this to my website?

currently this is a thought experiment, but if anyone wants to work on it, let me know, my contact info is on the post.

Also, this wasn't meant as "the solution" to the problem, more just maybe we should be looking for small solutions that don't require a huge amount of infrastructure to run.

> That's what makes this system so great, you don't see what other people you don't even know say

But how do you get started? Are you saying you only look at blogs of people who you've met in real life and who told you their blog URL? Even that is unrealistic because lots of blogs link to other blogs. Why should I be okay with following a link from one blog post to another blog post but not okay with seeing a comment on a blog post?