The walled gardens let you do some things you can't easily do on the public internet, like, retweet, reply, limit your audience, etc. The obvious downsides are advertising, and arbitrary decisions of corporations.
Contrast this to blogs and RSS feeds. If you pay for hosting, and stay within the confines of your agreement, you're likely to be able to say almost anything that is legal, and never have to worry about censorship or moderation, because you end up censoring yourself. You directly face the consequences of your speech, which is much closer to the way things should be.
So.. you write a blog... how do you know if someone liked or reposted your content? Google and other search engines provided a feedback loop, but that took time, and created additional worries, such as a dependence on Google RSS feeds help, once you have discovered someone, you can use it to keep track of their future posts.
Likes and reposts, replies, etc.. either had to be dealt with on a per blog basis, or by migrating to one of the walled gardens.
I propose that we make reads, likes, etc. public, or encrypted and public, and self hosted. For each blog, there should be a standard way to post reply URLs (and only the URL)... now spam is an issue, and I've got ideas on how to deal with that... but if we break up the functionality (ALL of the functionality) of Facebook, Twitter, etc so that every piece of data they collected is owned by, and managed by us... wouldn't that be a good thing?
A standard blog would have
A> a standard way to submit a "reply URL"...
B> a creative commons license that allowed republishing with attribution.
You would read my post, and your reader would then allow you to inform me you read it, liked it, commented on it, reposted it, etc... it would do so by first posting the reply to YOUR blog, then sending the URL of that post to the "reply URL" bot.
Once the URL was received, it could be retrieved, validated, etc... and used to count reads, likes, etc.
Absolutely no involvement of any search engine would be required to post and get replies, thus feedback could be *almost* as fast as on twitter, facebook, etc.