Facebook obviously has some things a lot of people like. People ought to be thinking about what kind of design features would be good in an open alternative.
A few general thoughts:
Protocol, rather than specific organization:
Nobody who can get called up to be grilled by politicians.
Server-agnostic protocol: Makes censorship much more difficult. You should be able to see what people you follow post regardless of what server they choose to use, or what country that server is in.
Posts are hosted by the person posting them, on a server of their choice, and are there responsibility. Public posts are just like a blog, with comments done via the protocol, and privacy settings let you have lists of people who can see and comment on your various posts.
Good filtering: You control what you want to be notified of, in what order. Also, sophisticated blocking/blacklist capabilities.
Anything missing?
