Is there something like a federated version of Facebook? I liked the premise in the early days, especially the early days of the timeline when it could actually be sorted chronologically. When I joined Facebook instead of the then-competing MySpace back in 2005 one of the things I liked was that it was pretty private; everything I did was only visible to the people I was friends with on the platform. I don’t even know how that would really work with federation since it seems like structurally everything kind of has to be public.

I guess what I’d like is something where my friends and family are easily connected, where I can share pictures/videos or links or just thoughts I have about whatever’s going on in the moment, but still have those only visible to the people I choose (including even adjusting that so some things are visible only to close family instead of all my friends, for example). And I want the same coming from my connections. I don’t want to see something else they commented on, I don’t want to see content from some friend-of-a-friend or group a friend follows, I don’t want to see content from total strangers or groups the platform just thinks I’ll like. Basically I just want Facebook like it was in the early days, before it started focusing on increasing engagement to drive ad revenue, when it was actually a kind of useful way to connect.