It seems like many people have the same or similar ideas. I was thinking of using a tool similar to bookmark-managers as the foundation of a new web. Where you subscribe to RSS-feeds of specific (or clusters of) people to specific topics as the "follow" primitive and you publish your own feed(s), which bookmark-managers btw. already allow. The missing pieces are commenting on the feeds of friends and a layer of federated ML for ranking, which the user controls by simple sliders that set the mark for dimensions like retrieval-vs-discovery, hightrust-vs-highnovelty, recency-vs-trendingimpetus and so on.