[sdwr]

That's beautiful! Inverts the whole process, flips the script. I can see it splitting bi-modal in a bad way though. Friends are one thing, but most following will probably be of aggregators / known figures, and they're going to be either lowest-common-denominator, or highly specialized. Basically gonna look like old reddit, where your options are AskScience or rage comics.

[cwkoss]

Yeah, my goal for this would be to develop an open protocol (similarish to email) that can solve reddit-like use cases. I think something along these lines could accomplish both lowest common denominator and specialized use cases (perhaps needing users ability to have separate 'personas' with different follow weights).

I think there could be different clients for different kinds of users - do you want to curate your follow list and transitively republish? Or do you mostly want to only consume and only publish your direct upvotes?

But I haven't gamed out the network effects very deeply, could be some pernicious scaling problems I have handwaved away.