We already have those social networks. They’re called forums. (I know some introduced likes but they don’t mean much, since your post is still just as likely to be seen as everyone else’s.)
Someone like add this may create one. There are already plenty of ways you can turn a like into a share on facebook, twitter, Tumblr etc instapaper's new social options is one
You could actually convert this into some kind of social network. Just enable people to follow each other in some sense, i.e. their messages appear in your feed with higher probability or so. It's nice and somewhat artistic to follow other persons only based on what they say/said, not based on who they are.
There's already a lot of aggregators which are partially-social. For example theoldreader tells me that someone likes a specific post from RSS feed. Not sure if they have recommendations, but they could certainly generate them if they wanted.
I'm not sure what the end product will look like or what the functionality will be, but when I think of "distributed social network" I'd like to see something like a HN node, a reddit node, a Digg node, a Slashdot node, etc., where they all communicate with each other and aggregate updates from all those platforms, so that if I make a comment or submit a story on one site, it shows up on the "social network" part of my profile across every other site. A bit like FriendFeed, I suppose. If large sites adopted it in that way, it could certainly become a "very real social network."
RSS is a good example. In the simplest form my proposed social network structure could be seen as RSS feed of all the social web that is stored in a decentralized database. The main feature is that the posts can be 'liked' or 'upvoted' by users (domains).
There is/was already a social network for that - Ning.
Back when social network platforms became A Thing they adopted OpenSocial - they had a news feed, notifications, etc - but each social network was completely isolated. I haven't taken a look at Ning since I worked on social networking apps about 12 years ago, so I have no clue how they've evolved since then.
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