my kingdom for an actually functioning first-class social web (and not a bunch of silo clones co-opting the term)
the *real* missing building block is an identity that is consistently recognized everywhere across the web
couple that with a standard way to publish web resources as that identity, and you have basically everything you need
@mauve it's already pretty widely accepted on the web that DNS mostly works, so we can also establish identity that way (say we agreed to give everyone a FQDN so they can do TLS, or we adopted the CID spec https://www.w3.org/TR/cid-1.0/ so that they could use some URI or DID). aside from that we could also distribute bearer tokens out-of-band, but we have better options