[idle_zealot]

These all feel quite over-engineered. I feel like a combination of a webpage with your bio and a feed of posts with an associated RSS feed could cover the "follow a user/microblogging" side of social media, and email could cover direct messaging and threaded conversations. What am I missing that these protocols bring to the table?

[3np]

Semantics. Notions of tags, replies, metadata, what kind of entity a link is refering to. Stable identifiers (how do you canonically refer to content rehosted elsewhere?). Authenticity for rehosted content. There was/is an idea and attempt at "semantic web" aka "web 3.0" but it never caught on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web

Also, a common requirement is authenticated reads and fine-grained access control of pull-based content. E.g. I want to share my vacation photos with a different subset of friends/followers vs my tech blogging, only some of which should be public.

[manuelmoreale]

I’m with you. The more I follow all these various projects the more I’m convinced we already have the best form of social media with personal websites + rss + email.