Essentially, yes. Great point! I think it needs more features to function more like a social network (transitive topic-based sharing, for one)

Hah, I designed one as well!

I think the flow of information has to be fundamentally different.

In mine, people only receive data directly from people they know and trust in real life. This makes scaling easy, and makes it impossible for centralized entities to broadcast propaganda to everyone at once.

I described it at freetheinter.net if you’re interested