Your post describes a ( ) protocol ( ) github repo ( ) manifesto ( ) kickstarter for a distributed social network. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. One or more of the following flaws may apply to your particular idea. ( ) You think "if you build it, they will come" ( ) All of the other social networks with more users, developers, time, and money ( ) "Users want to own their data" is an ideology not a use-case ( ) Public keys are not a magic wand to make security issues disappear ( ) Social problems dominate the technical ones ( ) People use email for that Specifically your design fails to account for ( ) Scale ( ) Adoption ( ) That popularity is a Distributed Denial of Service attack ( ) Malicious Denial of Service attacks can happen too ( ) Only supporting ASCII or Latin-1 is racist ( ) HTTP Caching and Load Balancing ( ) Timezones are a necessary evil ( ) So is Unicode ( ) NAT Traversal ( ) Federation exists already ( ) DNS is still centralized ( ) Cross-site-scripting and SQL Injection are not features ( ) Further fragmentation will not solve interoperability ( ) Spam and the following philosophical objections may also apply ( ) Character limits are the QWERTYUIOP of messaging ( ) Your homebrew markup is a tragedy of regular expressions ( ) Your understanding of HTTP and Representational State Transfer, is as informed as a youtube comment ( ) If it can't be used for piracy, it isn't decentralized enough ( ) You are proposing a new central point of failure ( ) OAuth. Now you have two problems ( ) OAuth2. The SOAP of Authentication Furthermore, this is what I think about you: ( ) Sorry, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and I am going to make fun of you on a centralized social network. ( ) I will enjoy watching your dreams fall into obscurity and regret. I have popcorn.