@timhardy oh another thing you'll probably like, I'm working on %ssb-ooo which is a key social scalability feature - it will allow you to just replicate a few people, but still see the conversations your friends are having (with people they follow but you do not). It will pull in their messages (Out Of Order) but not replicate their whole feeds. It will only pull in stuff that your friends have acknowledged (theirfore, kinda of pulled in to your context)
This means that if your friend is arguing with a troll, the troll will never have the last word (from your perspective) you'll always see your friend's last reply as last. I feel this is quite poetic - but also something that just falls out of the technology, and is not explicitly designed.