As someone who explicitly designed social protocols since 2011, who met Tim Berners-Lee and his team when they were building SOLID (before he left MIT and got funded to turn it into a for-profit Inrupt) I can tell you that files are NOT the best approach. (And neither is SPARQL by the way, Tim :) SOLID was publishing ACLs for example as web resources. Presumably you’d manage all this with CalDAV-type semantics.

But one good thing did come out of that effort. Dmitri Zagidulin, the chief architect on the team, worked hard at the W3C to get departments together to create the DID standard (decentralized IDs) which were then used in everything from Sidetree Protocol (thanks Dan Buchner for spearheading that) to Jack Dorsey’s “Web5”.

Having said all this… what protocol is better for social? Feeds. Who owns the feeds? Well that depends on what politics you want. Think dat / hypercore / holepunch (same thing). SLEEP protocol is used in that ecosystem to sync feeds. Or remember scuttlebutt? Stuff like that.

Multi-writer feeds were hard to do and abandoned in hypercore but you can layer them on top of single-writer. That’s where you get info join ownership and consensus.

ps: Dan, if you read this, visit my profile and reach out. I would love to have a discussion, either privately or publicly, about these protocols. I am a huge believer in decentralized social networking and build systems that reach millions of community leaders in over 100 countries. Most people don’t know who I am and I’m happy w that. Occasionally I have people on my channel to discuss distributed social networking and its implications. Here are a few:

Ian Clarke, founder of Freenet, probably the first decentralized (not just federated) social network: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWrRqUkJpMQ

Noam Chomsky, about Free Speech and Capitalism (met him same day I met TimBL at MIT) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gv5mI6ClPGc

Patri Friedman, grandson of Milton Friedman on freedom of speech and online networks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lgil1M9tAXU