so if I started a new sub Reddit that was part of a particular company initiative and connected people with it, I would not own that sub Reddit because it is not my platform.
this is a problem.
Something where ownership of the content and the virtual space is democratized or at least actually owned by someone in particular while still maintaining the capability to CDN the content.
This way you can still curate and you can still scale, but you also aren't held to the whims of whatever person or parent corporation owns the whole space behind the scenes.
The problem is not the protocol. But the user network. And the server network. And the ad network. They need to be made into protocols too.
Imagine git. Now imagine github. Now imagine gitlab. Github owns the entire social networking on its platform. It is not distributed at all. So does gitlab.
Github et. al added the connectivity and social aspects layered on top of what is fundamentally a version control tool.
Torrenting or cryptocurrencies are better examples, where fundamentally they are social in nature and in the case of torrenting it's ridiculously easy to jump from provider to provider.