Thesis: a web of trust based social network wouldn't have a reliable "global" follower / like / etc count -- it would only be the ones you've seen -- and this would be a feature.

Some of the most toxic behavior on Twitter comes from people trying to become "the most popular person in the room", which also leads to a lot of social messaging which isn't about being constructive, but differentiating yourself in a way that makes you look better than others.

@cwebber A web of trust that works would necessarily have to define what different types of trust relationship mean.

And for that, to work you would need to build a distributed ontology.
Which is why in past years I've been doing some thinking of how an "Ontological Web" should work.

The "semantic web" can't be semantic and doesn't mean anything if you don't have mutually intelligible ontologies.