5 minute read

You Don’t Follow People

You think you follow people on social media.

You don’t.

You follow a platform that decides — based on engagement metrics, ad revenue, and algorithmic optimization — which of those people’s posts you’ll actually see. And mixed in with those posts are bots, sponsored content, rage bait, and whatever the algorithm thinks will keep you scrolling.

You asked to hear from your friend. You got an ad for mattresses and a political argument between strangers.

That’s not following people. That’s being fed.

The Platform Is the Middleman

Think about what actually happens when you “follow” someone on a social platform:

  1. They post something
  2. The platform stores it on their servers
  3. The algorithm decides if you should see it
  4. If you’re lucky, it shows up in your feed
  5. Mixed with content you never asked for
  6. Surrounded by accounts that may or may not be human

You have no direct connection to the person you follow. The platform sits between you, controlling every signal in both directions.

They decide what you see. They decide what gets amplified. They decide what gets buried.

Your relationship with the people you follow is mediated entirely by a corporation optimizing for engagement, not connection.

The Bot Problem Is Worse Than You Think

How many of the accounts in your feed are real people?

Honestly. Think about it.

  • Bots generate content that looks human
  • AI accounts post 24/7 with manufactured opinions
  • Fake engagement inflates certain voices and drowns out others
  • Astroturfing campaigns look like grassroots movements
  • The platform has no reliable way to tell you which is which

And crucially: they have no incentive to. Bots drive engagement. Engagement drives ads. Ads drive revenue. The platform profits from the noise.

You wanted to follow your neighbor’s woodworking hobby. You got a feed full of AI-generated outrage posted by accounts that don’t correspond to any living person.

What “Following” Should Mean

Strip away the platforms and ask a simple question: what would it mean to actually follow someone?

It would mean:

  • You choose who you hear from. Not an algorithm.
  • They publish, you receive. No middleman deciding if it reaches you.
  • You know they’re real. Cryptographically. Not “blue checkmark for $8.”
  • They know you’re real. Not a bot, not a scraper, not an ad targeting system.
  • The connection is direct. No corporation sitting between you, monetizing the relationship.

This isn’t complicated. This is how following someone should have always worked.

KERI Makes People Followable

Here’s what changes when people have their own identifiers — not platform handles, but actual cryptographic identifiers they own:

People Become Publishers

Not “users on a platform.” Publishers. Like a website, but identity-native.

  • They sign their content with their identifier
  • You subscribe to their identifier, not a platform handle
  • Their content reaches you directly
  • You can verify it came from them — cryptographically, not by trusting a platform’s blue check

No Platform Required

The platform becomes optional distribution, not the required infrastructure.

  • Want to use a platform for discovery? Fine. But the relationship lives outside it.
  • Platform dies? Your subscriptions survive.
  • Platform bans someone? You still hear from them if you choose to.
  • Platform changes its algorithm? Doesn’t matter. You have a direct connection.

Bots Become Obvious

When every publisher has a verifiable identifier tied to a Key Event Log:

  • Real people have persistent, verifiable histories
  • Bot farms can’t cheaply generate identifiers with credible histories
  • You can see when an identifier was created, what it’s done, who vouches for it
  • “Account created yesterday, posting 400 times an hour” becomes visible and filterable

Not eliminated. Nothing eliminates bots entirely. But you can tell the difference. Right now you can’t.

What Your Feed Could Look Like

Imagine opening your feed and seeing:

  • Your sister’s update about her garden — because you follow her identifier
  • A local woodworker’s new project — because someone you trust vouched for them
  • A journalist you respect — whose identity you verified once, and now you always know it’s really them
  • Your neighborhood group — actual neighbors, verified by community attestation

No ads (unless you opted in). No bots (unless they earned enough reputation to matter). No algorithm deciding what you deserve to see.

Just people. The ones you chose.

“But I Like Discovery”

Fair. Platforms are good at surfacing new things. Nobody’s arguing against discovery.

The argument is against conflating discovery with your relationships.

You can have:

  • Discovery platforms where you browse new content and people
  • AND a follow list that’s yours, direct, unmediated, bot-free

These don’t have to be the same thing. In fact, they shouldn’t be. Discovery is a service. Your relationships are not a service. They’re yours.

The Social Media Trick

Social media’s greatest trick was convincing you that “following” someone on their platform meant you had a relationship with that person.

You don’t.

You have a relationship with the platform. The platform has a relationship with that person. And the platform sits in the middle, optimizing both relationships for its own benefit.

That’s not social. That’s intermediation dressed up as connection.

What This Looks Like Practically

This isn’t science fiction. The architecture exists.

KERI identifiers give people persistent, portable, cryptographically verifiable presence on the internet.

Signing at the edge means content is signed by the person who created it, on their device, verifiable by anyone.

OOBIs (Out-of-Band Introductions) let you discover and connect with people without needing a shared platform.

Selective disclosure means people can publish to different audiences without a platform managing their privacy settings.

The pieces are here. What’s missing is adoption — and the collective realization that following a platform handle isn’t following a person.

The Choice

You can keep “following” 500 people on a platform that shows you 30 of them, mixed with bots and ads, filtered by an algorithm optimizing for someone else’s revenue.

Or you can follow people. Actually follow them. Directly. Verifiably. On your terms.

The technology to do this exists today. The question is whether we’ll keep accepting the platform’s version of “follow” — or start building something that means what it says.

TODO: Add technical walkthrough of KERI-based content subscription, comparison of subscription models (RSS, ActivityPub, Nostr) with KERI approach, and concrete examples of community-based follow networks

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