A Federated Network of Personal Websites

For a long time I have been roaming about the possibility of having a swarm of personal websites acting as nodes of a completely federated social network. It is a titanic task, with little corporate gain, but nonetheless an idea that I wanted to discuss openly, to see what happens.

There are some assumptions:

1 . Having a website online is harder than creating a Facebook profile
2. Hosting a website is more expensive than having a profile on a social network
3. Content Management Systems such as Wordpress do not offer enough networking between content generator/content consumers
4. There is (to my knowledge) no standard protocol for interconnecting websites through feeds taking into account privacy settings
5. Content generators (at least some) care about having control, at the same time they care about reaching out and connecting with people

What I see as a potential solution

Imagine I have a personal website, like a blog/micro-blog, with some extra features: photo gallery, event management. Some content is private, some is public. Just like in Facebook. Now, another person who has a website just like mine, asks me for access to my private content, or I invite them to an event.

If both websites implement a standard (similar to OAuth), now I can have access to private content on that person's website, and the other way around. Think a fancy RSS feed harvesting data from different sources. In this way, each website acts as a node on a network of inter connected websites with different layers of access.

I can access my 'backend' and see the stream of news from other people's channels. I can see the invitation to events. It's been a while since I deleted my Facebook account, so I am not sure what is going on in there, but I bet most of the functionality does not require a centralized server.

Of course, there could be platforms operating farms of these websites (think wordpress.com vs wordpress.org), but while still enabling users to self-host, and release their creativity. Do you want to split your professional life from your private life? Want to share photos without being locked-in by Instagram? Or would you like to share your podcasts?

Add a torrent-like feature for static assets and you got yourself a CDN without a central authority ;-)

So.
What do you like or what do you think is wrong with this idea?